What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2010?  Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Zvi Guterman, CEO of IT Structures

Predictions for 2010 – the year virtual machines go invisible 

You heard it here first: most of the IT industry would love to see virtual machines vanish in 2010. This is not to say virtualization, as a technology isn't more ubiquitous than ever. On the contrary, we believe that it's that drive to ubiquity that will make the question "VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V" become passé.

With the database and webserver wars of the 1990's long behind us, does anyone still ask "What database and webserver is Salesforce.com using?" Do we ever think (or care) about whether WebEx is using RealNetworks, Microsoft Media, or Quicktime... or their own codecs? How about Email? As long as it's IMAP-compliant and responsive, do you know or care what your email server is or where it's running?

The truth of what we're all still calling hosted Virtual Machines & virtual networks, Cloud, or *aaS products is that no member of any good IT organization wants to think about them. Businesses would prefer that services remain services - that one can go out onto the web and order up X number of seats of email or CRM or conferencing and forget about the infrastructure.

That abstraction is part of what made VMware so popular - we were able to start forgetting about "machines" in the Dell/HP/IBM sense and move to Visio diagrams of servers.

My belief is that the next wave of use is here. We are already thinking in terms of "seats" of IT, of deployments of "instances" of email or CRM or IT environments for days or hours or minutes, as needed, on demand.

So let's get specific about my predictions for 2010:

• The "Race for the bottom" will continue in the hosting market per-VM pricing. Eventually Amazon and others will recognize that businesses hate being nickel-and-dimed to death, and will come up with cell-plan-like tiered pricing.
• "Cloud Applications" will start to emerge. Rather than a management framework, these will be true IT-oriented services, such as "Expandable Email" or "Demos on Demand"
• Your brand of Hypervisor will matter less than which of your existing bare-metal OS/App stacks it supports.
• Leading-edge adopters will make cloud deployment the standard - you'll be expected to try a cloud deployment, then back down to local VMs, then only as a last resort install on local silicon.

We don't want the detail of how many machines are needed to run IT - that's like asking how many cylinders your car needs to drive to New York. The world cares about results - services provided - not geeky infrastructure details. We don't have time for that.

So dealing with virtual machines, like physical machines (what an antiquated concept), is passé. And what happens to such technology when it's essential but invisible - like phone service, or the databases and webservers under Force.com?  It fades from sight. It becomes invisible.

My key prediction for 2010? Virtual Machines become invisible. They'll still be around; you'll dial some up when you need them, fully loaded and running in a complete environment, but they'll be yesterday's news. Just as in fashion Orange is the new Black, Cloud is the new Virtual.

About the Author

Zvi Guterman is the CEO of IT Structures (www.itstructures.com), a Gemini and Sequoia-backed company that is helping hundreds of companies extend their virtual infrastructure to the Cloud.