Predictions for 2011 by the virtualization community

At Veeam, community involvement is a big priority. We are lucky to have such a strong community in this area of technology, and for this post we have reached out to a few members of the virtualization community to contribute here. We’ve asked technology personalities to comment on what they think 2011 will see in virtualization in general. Not from what Veeam will be doing, but the general technology direction. In their own words, this is what our five virtualization experts foresee in 2011:

image Edward Haletky, VMware vExpert and more: https://www.virtualizationpractice.com

I predict that we will see more big companies buying small companies as well as more partnerships within the virtualization ecosystem. This year we have seen major investments from well known players into smaller players. This trend will continue with the smaller players being bought by the larger players. I expect to see a consolidation in the virtualization eco-system.

In the virtualization security space, I expect VMware to make larger in-roads, adding more into vShield with the help of RSA. There will still be a gap in this space for the SMB as VMware’s goal for the SMB is to convince them to move into the public cloud which is managed by the larger enterprises into which VMware sells.

I expect Secure Multi-Tenant within the public cloud to be a bigger and bigger problem next year as public clouds are attacked and put under pressure.

image Maish Saidel-Keesing, VMware vExpert and more: https://technodrone.blogspot.com/

Cloud will become mainstream (even though not all definitions of cloud will be the same), be it either public or private cloud, but hybrid cloud will not be adopted with such ease. Organizations are weary of what they cannot control and until that issue can be addressed with a security solution that provides a level of management which does not fall short of their corporate network, connections between the the public and private cloud will not become mainstream. On the other hand – this provides a great number of challenges and opportunities for the security vendors to fill this gap.

All the other major virtualization players (Microsoft – Xen – Red Hat) – will release a cloud product this year.

image Deb Shinder, Microsoft MVP and more: https://www.debshinder.com/

One prediction I would make is that the private cloud, as a transition technology for organizations that aren’t yet ready to trust their applications and data to the public cloud and outside cloud providers, will become increasingly important in 2011 and since the private cloud concept is heavily dependent on virtualization, that will drive the development of more and more sophisticated virtualization options. I also think as more companies roll out Windows 7 clients, Windows Virtual PC running the XP Mode VMs will become a standard way of hanging onto those old proprietary applications that won’t run on Windows 7. To an increasing extent, virtualization will no longer be just about server consolidation. The ability to run virtualized applications seamlessly will remove many of the obstacles that once stood in the way of a broader adoption of virtualized solutions.

imageChris House, VMware VCP and more: https://www.virtirl.com/

For 2011, server and desktop virtualization will continue to grow across the datacenter, much like a fabric of steel rebar reinforcing the concrete pillars supporting the physical enterprise.

Existing physical workloads once thought of as poor candidates for virtualization will continue to be virtualized with growing success and virtualization barriers will be broken. The private internal cloud will continue to expand and envelop all applications.

Server vendors will increasingly sell higher density servers packed with processors and memory as customers turn from buying servers for applications to buying servers as building blocks for the virtual infrastructure. Storage vendors will continue focusing on optimizing their architectures for the virtual infrastructure, offloading storage activities and moving them to their platform for increased efficiency.

The desktop virtualization holdouts will dip their toes in the pool and find it warm and inviting; if not a little murky, but increased offerings from desktop virtualization vendors will further clear the water and enable these desktop managers to complete wide-ranging management tasks in hours rather than weeks or months.


Tom Howarth, VMware vExpert and more: https://www.planetvm.net/

Tis the season to be jolly and time for reflection, but let’s look ahead to 2011 and think what may happen.

One thing that is going to happen, the service Console will be gone by the end of 2011. Now on to may happens, Cloud may have finally got out of Marketing and Fluff land and actually begun to deliver real value at a corporate level, rather than the toys that are currently being touted as Public Clouds.

NetApp will be acquired by somebody, maybe HP or IBM more likely Oracle to complete their service stack, a real storage offering is all that is missing from their portfolio now.

And on a personal note – I will finally commit to doing my VCDX.

Veeam blog site note: These predictions are entirely those of the individuals, and not an indication of any Veeam interest or future product. These are free community contributions from the above bloggers and personalities.

Now it is your turn, share your predictions below for virtualization in 2011!

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