On January 22, 2008, Microsoft announced that it had seen the light of virtualized utility infrastructure and plans to be aggressive about “dynamic IT” from the desktop to the data center. This is a significant move. However, Microsoft is late to the party. Consider a future promise against current reality to find what best aligns with enterprise virtualization strategy.
Microsoft Discovers Utility Infrastructure
The Microsoft virtualization kick-off included an executive memo from Senior VP Bob Muglia to 300,000 industry partners and customers. There is essentially nothing new in the core vision of “dynamic IT” that hasn’t been expounded by proponents of virtualization and consolidated utility infrastructure over the past three years. In short:
- Virtualization enables decoupling (abstraction) of applications and operating system instances from underlying hardware.
- Decoupling enables more efficient utilization of hardware because it breaks down the silos of one app stack and OS instance per physical box.
- Virtualization also enables more flexibility and manageability of applications because their delivery and maintenance is isolated from hardware and other applications.
Microsoft also stressed that benefits of virtualization extend beyond the data center to desktop OS and application virtualization. Microsoft’s SoftGrid application virtualization was cited as the company’s fastest growing product. Rival VMware is also making moves into the application virtualization area with its recent acquisition of Thinstall.
