I had a dream….

I had a dream and in that dream I saw that in 2011:

• Nobody is fighting over hypervisor performance anymore. Whether Hyper-V, Xen or VMware, all three are perfectly capable of running the heaviest workloads in your datacenter. Companies will use a mix of hypervisors for specific duties. There are still differences between the three but that is more like choosing a BMW or a Mercedes. (Although the people looking for enjoyment, class and excitement in life, would still go for an Alfa Romeo of course.)

• VMware lost the battle on the management field as vCenter is not the main management tool for the virtual environment. Microsoft delivers a great way of integrating any and especially multiple hypervisors in to a Windows environment and made managing a mix of physical and virtual servers a breath using SCOMM 2011.
• VMware is still the most innovative company in the field of virtualization and is still that step ahead of its competitors. Therefore VMware remains the number one choice for the most demanding workloads. Demanding not necessarily in performance, but mainly in security, availability and flexibility.

Dreaming of clouds:

• The Cloud has finally become accepted. More and more companies are using the Cloud, although there is also a huge number whos organization just is not ready yet to see their applications and data move to a land far far away, where they lose feeling with what they do and don’t own.
• On a technical level, VMware is way ahead of competitors in the Cloud and has clearly won the first battle. VMware has managed to create an open Cloud platform that is almost seamlessly between internal and external clouds. Whereas competitors like Microsoft make you rewrite your applications specifically for their cloud product. Paul Martiz’s Hotel California analogy has become reality for those who didn’t chose VMware Clouds.
• By 2011 only 40% of the business applications are fully cloud aware and can benefit from the cloud rather than just be an application running inside a virtual machine.
• Datacenters can be completely virtual. Servers, networking and storage can be modified and assigned on demand. A virtual datacenter can be created and removed within minutes and offer different service levels. They can spread geographical locations and be moved to locations where power is the cheapest. We’re very close to seeing a physical datacenter as just a huge box where you throw cpu, memory, network and storage in and make it completely indifferent to where it’s being used.

Dreaming mobile:

• The mobile worker can connect to his data and applications in many different ways. On his laptop he is running a client hypervisor to run his home apps on the same machine as his business applications. On his mobile phone he uses a hypervisor to quickly switch between business application and fun. All great mobile features that have been announced for years, access anything anytime anywhere, has become true.
• One of the biggest fears of the employer has become true; your boss can bug you with anything anytime anywhere.
• VMware has just released version 1.5 of its client hypervisor and is slowly catching up with the leaders in the client hypervisor field (VirtualComputer and Citrix). Limited functionality and few supported systems on the HCL for their first release made VMware miss the boat on this one.
• The switch from terminal server to VDI is still difficult to sell. Infrastructures that offer Terminal services for some time now don’t have the immediate need to switch to VDI since virtual applications are helping them in situations where a switch to VDI would previously be needed. Although VDI is the better choice for the company that starts a green field scenario.

Dreaming of storage:

• Storage has become more virtual than ever. It almost feels as if you just order a harddisk of your liking and throw it (gently) in to a big black box. The SAN will figure out the characteristics and how to match these to your service needs.
• Integration with the hypervisor and the rest of the virtual infrastructure will be greatly enhanced. The SAN works much closer together with the virtual infrastructure and is able to shift workloads to different volumes or even different storage boxes, without any interference by the storage admin.

Dreaming the impossible:

• On my office wall I have a picture of Steve Balmer, Paul Maritz and Simon Crosby walking out of a bar, arm in arm totally drunk after they just signed an agreement to not argue anymore about who has the best product, but work together to give the user the best of the best of the best. But maybe this is a bit too much, even in a dream like this :-)