What's next for virtualisation?

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“Many companies are bound not by tech constraints, but by regulatory constraints,” said Paul Maritz, VMware's president and chief executive. “Many regulations change more quickly than technology.”

Mobile, global working

People move, companies spread. Neither of those events are new to business, nor are the challenges of keeping workers online and hooked into corporate systems regardless of where they travel to.

Virtual desktops are one way of dealing with this. Each worker has a desktop they can access, on a thin client terminal, thick client like a laptop, or even on a mobile phone or other smaller client device.

It can also let admins keep a tighter watch of what users are doing on their desktops. “The one I like is you can self-destruct [a VM] if you don’t like someone’s behaviour on the desktop,” said chief technology officer Stephen Herrod.

Thick clients

On the other hand, why do we need to be jet-setting around the globe to use the technology at hand?

Virtual desktops could be one way to give into the consumerisation of corporate IT, by using virtualisation on thick clients like laptops instead of just thin client terminals. Workers show up wanting to use their MacBook instead of the standard Dell, while others want to access work from the desktop at their home.

By deploying virtual desktops, IT departments can effectively let their firm’s workers choose their device, then give them access to their work materials via a virtual machine.

“IT would like to get out of the business of owning IT,” said Herrod. “Users want to use something personal to them.”

Indeed, while a desktop over a network may work for many, it won’t work for all – and others will want to take full advantage of their shiny new laptops multimedia features.

For this, admins can use offline modes, sending all the applications and files associated with the virtual machine to live on the computer, and updating them when the computer connects to a network.

On top of that, it lets users store some data on their hardware, which also makes sense for businesses. As Maritz noted, you don’t want to go from the cheap storage on laptops to the most expensive – that found in a data centre.

So really, adding virtualisation to thick clients could offer the best of both worlds for many businesses – so expect to hear more about it.

Chargeback

Because virtual machines are trackable, it’s easy to see exactly how much money each bit of IT costs. That new marketing project? HR’s new system? It’s easier now to see the costs associated with each – how much licences will cost, how much the energy bill will total and so on.

Why this can lead to utility computing, with IT charging other departments for what they use, it can also help give business leaders more clarity on how much new projects will really cost – before the project’s finished, instead of after.

Cloud

You may have heard of cloud computing? It’s this small trend that’s been creeping into IT... while there’s been lots of hype, it hasn’t yet taken off for most companies.

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