shareVM- Share insights about using VM's

I read Steve Herrod’s (CTO, VMWare) Top 10 predictions for virtualization in 2009 and have summarized them below:

1. Virtual Desktop Initiative (VDI): Companies will invest in virtualizing desktops primarily to drive down the total cost of ownership.
2. Virtualization-aware storage “that offer native array support for common storage operations on virtual machines such as replication and migration; thin provisioning and de-duplication capabilities to optimize storage usage – which is particularly important for the desktop use case; and virtual machine-based storage (virtual storage arrays) solutions.”
3. High-end applications will leverage virtualization support in CPU’s to gain significant performance improvements and be able to run in VM’s.
4. Virtualization-aware cloud services: Standardization of OS and application images in virtual machines  enable cloud services to import and export industry-standard virtual machines and provide additional compute capacity on demand. “On the user level, it enables virtual desktops to follow users as they travel. On the enterprise level, it enables workloads to be automatically redistributed to meet capacity needs and take advantage of eco-friendly locations where electricity can be tapped at much lower costs“.
5. Virtualization-aware networking:  For example, VMWare and Cisco are collaborating on integrating VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions with Cisco Application Delivery Networking solutions to improve the performance of virtual desktops delivered across wide-area networks (WANs). In addition, network vendors are also optimizing for virtualization network  traffic, remote display protocols; network management tools will see through the virtualization layer to monitor and manage at the virtual machine -level, and vendors  will begin shipping software-based network switches.
6. Virtualization in smart phones: Ultra-thin hypervisors will provide a common platform abstraction across devices from several manufacturers so that the same software stack works across all phones enabling a faster time to market with a much lower product development cost. End users will so be able to run multiple profiles, e.g., one for personal use and one for work use – on the same phone
7. Virtualization-Focused Security Solutions: Today there is a dearth of practical solutions that can run within a VM without impacting the performance significantly. A new generation of virtualization-aware security solutions will emerge.
8. Management tools with increased focus on the virtual datacenter: BMC, CA, HP and IBM have announced products, standard APIs and integration technologies that facilitate the integration of management functions into virtualization platforms to enable end-to-end management processes spanning heterogeneous datacenter environments, a wide variety of application stacks, and physical and virtual use cases.
9. Green datacenters: Virtualization is driving server consolidation and also incorporates power management features to quiesce VM’s when they are not in use and bring them online on demand. This continues to lead to reduction in demands for electrical power within the datacenter.
10. Cloud services providers are using virtualization as the core infrastructure upon which their services are offered.

I found it particularly striking that the standardization of the execution environment provided by a VM is driving large business opportunities in three disparate segments, namely, VDI, virtualization-aware cloud services and virtualization in smart phones. The predictions form an interesting list because they echo some of the themes that are driving your readership of this blog, namely, developer experiences with using vm’s, how to use a cloud service like ec2, shrinking vm’s, sharing vm’s, etc