What's next for virtualisation?

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After a week at VMworld in San Francisco earlier this month, a few trends seemed to emerge in the virtualisation world.

Here’s our rundown of the top few. Make sure you’re keeping an eye on these virtualisation trends so you don’t get left in the virtual dust.

Mobile

It’ll be years before mobile phone virtualisation becomes commonplace, but VMware is already in talks with un-named manufacturers to put hypervisor onto handsets. The first round of such phones are likely to just use a virtual machine to run legacy software, but within a few years, IT administrators could be placing corporate virtual machines onto personal handsets.

Why do this? It will cut costs, as it lets employees use their phone of choice. As mobile head Srinivas Krishnamurti noted at VMworld, the types of business workers who are given courtesy phones from work tend to be able to afford their own, and want to use just one across both work and play.

It also lets IT admins manage corporate handsets a bit more easily, in the same way they would any other client device.

Virtualisation is already showing up in some novel ways on phones. There are already a few apps for the iPhone that allow access to virtualsed environments, to let admins restart servers from their handset, while others bring desktops to the phone.

In fact, handset makers might want to offer virtualisation so their own devices can access Apple’s App Store, to keep people from buying an iPhone just for the applications.

“From a consumer standpoint, when you buy a [handset], you’re stuck on an island of apps,” said Krishnamurti.

Although, as VMware admitted, Apple might not be too happy about that.

Green management

Greener IT has always been a selling point of virtualisation, mostly because it cuts down on servers and other hardware being used, and the power and cooling associated with them.

While that’s no small saving, taking virtualisation deeper and automating management tools means at slower times workloads can be consolidated onto fewer servers, letting unused ones be powered down.

This can only happen if you’re entirely sure what each virtual machine is doing, so decent management software will be required...

Data control and compliance

So you want to move data to the cloud, but you don’t want to risk a data breach or break any local regulations. New management tools mean policies can be applied to virtual machines and the data inside them, telling them to be held under specific security ratings or be kept in certain geographies.

This will help keep data safe and in the right spot, while letting other data move to possibly cheaper clouds overseas. As more and more data is virtualised and moves to the cloud, keeping track of exactly where it is will become increasingly important.

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