Virtualization is one of the hottest technologies in IT infrastructure today. According to Gartner, “Virtualization is the highest impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012. It will change how you manage, how and what you buy, how you deploy, how you plan, and how you charge.” Several studies by the research firm IDC support this claim. The firm reports 22 percent of servers today as being virtualized and expects that number to grow to 45 percent over the next 12 to 18 months. Another IDC study predicts the number of logical servers generated on virtualized servers will surpass the number of non-virtualized physical server units by 2010.

Historically limited to mainframe environments, virtualization’s rapid adoption on Intel® architecture-based platforms is being enabled by virtualization software and Intel’s advances in both multi-core processing and a suite of virtualization technologies known as Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT). The first virtualization implementations on Intel platforms primarily focused on server consolidation (utilizing multiple virtual machines to run multiple applications on one physical server). This consolidation has greatly benefited data centers by increasing server utilization and easing deployment of systems in data center environments.

Today Intel is helping enable the next generation of virtualization usage efficiently. Virtualization 2.0 focuses on increasing service efficiency through flexible resource management. In the near future, this usage model will become absolutely critical to data centers, allowing IT managers to use virtualization to deliver high availability solutions with the agility to address disaster recovery and real-time workload balancing so they can respond to the expected and the unexpected.