If you had any doubts that virtualization was the future of corporate IT, the VMworld 2010 conference held in San Francisco 2 weeks ago should lay those to rest. The conference, an annual gathering of VMware users, attracted more than 17,000 customers, partners, press, and analysts, and 233 sponsors and exhibitors. This went beyond the usual virtualization for business discussion. The focus moved to virtualization in the cloud.

Although there are other virtualization players, mainly Microsoft, VMware clearly has emerged as the virtualization leader in the x86 (PC server) world. CommVault, a storage provider, released the results of its survey of more than 10,000 customers and found that 83 percent identified VMware as their virtualization platform.

For the CFO, the question is not whether the organization should adopt virtualization, but how extensively it should virtualize and how fast. For starters, using virtualization to consolidate the proliferation of x86 servers is a no-brainer for the increased server utilization alone. Check out the CommVault server results here.

According to CommVault, 77 percent of the respondents run mission-critical applications on virtual machines in their production environments and nearly 50 percent are deploying between 50 and 250 virtual machines. A virtual machine is a logical server substituting for an actual physical server that otherwise would be taking up floor space and consuming energy. Five, 10, even 20 or more virtual machines can share a single physical server.

So what’s driving the surging interest in virtualization? According to the CommVault survey the top three factors driving server virtualization decisions are:

1. Improved business cost savings and efficiencies

2. Customer responsiveness (ability to deploy desired capabilities faster) and improved service levels

3. Opportunity to leverage virtualization as an alternative disaster recovery strategy

The last is important to CommVault, which is in the disaster recovery business.

Virtualization, however, doesn’t come without its own challenges. The top three challenges relative to managing virtualized server environments, according to survey respondents, are:

1. Inability to back up all virtual machines reliably and in a timely manner

2. Additional resource costs and administrative time due to lack of management automation

3. Increased demand for corporate-wide virtualization

The difficulty of virtual machine backup and recovery and the lack of automated tools to manage the virtual environment are widely recognized. The increased demand? Just look at VMworld attendance. Another challenge, one not noted in the CommVault survey, is the requirement for new virtualization skills. Virtualization is not as simple as some proponents make it out to be.

Virtualization is the future, certainly as far as corporate IT goes. Some suggest cloud computing actually is the future, but cloud computing as we know it today makes extensive use of virtualization. ###