Virtualization For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Peeking at the Future of Virtualization

In This Chapter

• Plotting virtualization's move into the operating system

• Solving installation woes by getting virtualized software

• Watching in amazement as virtualization oozes throughout the Internet

• Seeing how virtualization affects IT personnel

• Pricing your software in a post‐virtualization world

The virtualization trend is sweeping through IT like a brushfire through a bone‐dry forest. The potential for getting higher utilization from hardware, better responsiveness to changing business conditions, and lower cost operations has IT shops enthusiastically implementing the current generation of virtualization solutions.

I spend a good deal of time in Chapters 1 and 2 going over the business benefits of virtualization and how it can be applied in your organization, and I also linger a bit in Chapter 3 over the different types of virtualization out there in the marketplace. If you've taken the time to look over those chapters, it's probably begun to dawn on you that virtualization isn't just one more entry in the long line of “revolutionary” products that have hit the technology marketplace. You're absolutely right. Virtualization is a new infrastructure platform. It will affect many parts of the technology ecosystem as the paradigm shifts from the old one‐to‐one correspondence between software and hardware (bad!) to the new approach of software operating on whatever hardware happens to be most convenient to use (good!).

As virtualization ...