VMware ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise: Planning Deployment of Virtualization Servers, 2nd Edition

Epilogue: The Future of the Virtual Environment

Closing a book of this type is nearly impossible because the nature of virtualization is changing daily—and sometimes hourly. This makes tracking the future of virtualization difficult at best. More and more of the peripheral functions of the hypervisor are moving into hardware:

Intel-VT/AMD RVI both push many of the long and repetitive virtualization instruction streams down into the hardware so that only one instruction needs be called from the hypervisor to implement hundreds of repetitive instructions in the areas of VM to VM context switching, and for other similar tasks such as zeroing memory.

VMware AAI will do the same thing for the storage subsystem by reducing the number of storage calls ...