The Future of Virtualization

This chapter discusses the road map of virtualization including its various aspects as officially published by XenSource, along with various generalizations observed in the Xen development life cycle based on customer needs. It also discusses how Xen fits into a virtual infrastructure, combining it with other virtualization products. XenSource is collaborating with the Xen development community in a call for those new features and tools, so as to not just maintain the existing binaries. The main focus for the past few years has been on stability, ensuring that the product survived its infancy without any catastrophic issues. Now, in its adolescence, Xen has an eye fixed on VMware, Microsoft, and others, all with mature products. The informal and unofficial road map for Xen discusses four focus areas: performance and scalability, operating system support, beyond the x86 cpu architecture, and architecture enhancements. With the introduction of dual-core processors, the future began to look bright for x86 and x64 platforms. The Microsoft and XenSource have begun to collaborate in the development of virtualization technology that will enable interoperability between XenSource's hypervisor and Microsoft's Windows Server Virtualization has been a boon in the SMB arena. Companies without the budget for large and lavishdata centers can easily sustain the servers needed to run their business applications on a small footprint of infrastructure. Large enterprises have the opportunity to benefit most from server virtualization.