Virtualization is HOT! For good reason. It’s birthed an industry. Its impact is dramatic and far reaching. It could be said to be the best thing “since sliced bread,” or at least the internet browser.

First there’s its impact on the IT infrastructure. Virtualization has come a long way from its start as a technology with recognized, demonstrable benefits for streamlining and enhancing the test and development environment. It has progressed through prototyping and implementing small-scale, non-production critical server consolidation projects into the realizable, albeit radically different view of the datacenter. The datacenter composed of virtualized pools of servers, applications, storage and network that we are beginning to see today. Additionally, between VMware’s various virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) announcements at VMworld 2007 and Citrix’s recent XenDesktop announcement, virtualization’s impact is extending beyond the datacenter. This move to virtualizing the desktop infrastructure will undoubtedly begin hitting stride in 2008. Desktop virtualization changes the way IT provides the desktop infrastructure. In addition to making the low cost, thin client desktop a tenable solution, hosting the “PC” in datacenter-resident virtual machines fundamentally changes how desktops are managed by IT.

Then, its impact on IT operations and, yes, even the business itself. Essential IT operations’ workflows are affected from how IT provisions infrastructure resources, whether it be storage, virtual machines or desktops, to configuration, capacity and change management not to mention how it even troubleshoots problems. Also, let’s not forget the potential for increasing the number of 9s that can be written into Service Level Agreement uptime provisions due to shortened maintenance windows provided by virtual machine-based infrastructures. Furthermore, as Tiana Conlon, a senior project manager at Foedus, LLC so succinctly put it, “Adopting a virtual model is something that impacts not only how we utilize systems, but how we think about the environment as a whole and that can have quite an impact to not only IT, but the business owners of the applications that become part of this virtual environment”. Virtualization, specifically the speed with which virtual machines can be created and deployed, supports a faster IT response to changing business needs. The cycle time from business need recognition to business solution implementation by IT will continue to shrink as IT standardizes on virtual machine usage.

In short, virtualization is a disruptive technology driving the transformation of IT.

Read the rest of this article from Virtual-Strategy Magazine, here.