Milestone for Systems Virtualization

Today is day two of VMworlds and VMware’s Keynote speech was atop the list of things to see. A majority of the info has already been rehashed all over blogs so I wont go into details, but I did want to touch on a major point that was mentioned. Paul Martiz, President and CEO of VMware, announced that for the first time ever, the number of virtual machines has surpassed the number of physical machines.

This is huge news in the field is systems administration and engineering. This means the tipping point has been reached, where virtualization is no longer just a cutting edge technology, but the norm. Admins and engineers will now be required to know the ins and outs of virtualization and shift from the standard practices of physical environments. The VCP will become, and is becoming, a more common certification, and one they may even be required. The impact of this though, is that admins and engineers will require more training and knowledge than ever before, because while physical servers just require systems to be racked and OSes installed, virtual environemnts require knowledge and planning of storage, networking and scalability and capacity planning.

All and all, this is a good thing and I for one and glad to see this technology that we all enjoy thriving so well. I hope to continue to see if and maybe even by 2012, see the numbers be 75%/25% for virtual to physical systems.