IT Careers: Careers in Virtualization

IT Careers: Careers in Virtualization

Whether it's for storage or servers, network or desktop, enterprises have realized the advantages that virtualization brings to the table. At the time of an economic recession, where enterprises are going 'green', virtualization is the best answer to cope with. Here we look at virtualization as a career, and its scope for professionals

Friday, January 30, 2009

Rahul Sah with inputs from Isha Ghakar and Vishnu Anand

BANGALORE, INDIA: Virtualization technology is a buzzword in the industry but has been in the market for quite long. Organizations have been adopting this technology primarily because of the economic benefits, as it consolidates resources and reduces IT capital costs.

The current economic slowdown has forced organizations to better leverage their IT resources, and virtualization has become that golden solution that helps in optimization, and most efficient use of the IT resources. Also the 'Green IT' bandwagon that many of the enterprises are jumping upon, has also given Virtualization the impetus to be one of the hot technologies of last year.

As virtualization adoption continues to grow, the need for virtualization solution architects, developers, implementation specialists and virtualization administrators will continue to grow as well. The demand is high and there is a dearth of expert professionals in virtualization domain who can cater to this unprecedented demand.

Why is Virtualization hot?
The main reason is - economic benefits. Virtualization is the technology that enables sharing of resources, more specifically hardware resources between machine and application virtualization. There is a layer of extraction which is created on the hardware that enables the virtualization software to efficiently allocate the resources to the supported environment and this can happen on demand.

In addition to the efficient use of hardware resources, management of the infrastructure, high availability of resources -which is very important in an enterprise, increased security and disaster recovery are some of the main benefits of hosting a virtualization environment. For example, server virtualization can subdivide a single physical server of higher configuration into multiple 'virtual servers' that can be deployed as the need arises.

It eliminates the need for multiple physical servers, which would not only cost more, but will also require more space and will remain underutilized for most of the time. Enterprises that want their servers to be used at 80- 85 percent are increasingly adopting virtualization for their servers in their data-centers.

The advantages virtualization delivers are compelling enough for IT managers and CIOs to overlook. As virtualization continues to integrate itself into all aspects of IT infrastructures, the need for professionals who understand the technology is only going to increase.

Types of virtualization
When talked about virtualization, people generally refer to server virtualization, which in turn is just consolidation of the available server resource. However virtualization is not confined to servers, but has multiple types that can be briefed as follows:

1. Server virtualization: It separates an operating system from the underlying hardware resources.

2. Desktop virtualization: The remote manipulation of a computer desktop, based on traditional thin-client model.

3. Resource virtualization: The virtualization of specific system resources like storage or network.

4. Grid computing: The cluster of multiple discrete computers into a larger mega computer to harness maximum processing power.

5. Application virtualization: The hosting of application on alien hardware and providing that as a service remotely. Which happens to be like a SaaS-based model, but the application is actually streamed from the hosting server, while the client will be able to access that application as their system's native application and not through a browser as the case with SaaS based service.

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