Growth of Virtualization Support Products

Virtualization is moving to the next phase of integration with support products - third party backup, management and security software. Many of these much needed products are in early stages so this creates challenges around interoperability and the usual challenges of first release products.

Virtualization is so compelling from a speed of launching VMs to cost savings by running less physical servers that most business are forging forward in the face of these challenges. The extent of these challenges is questionable - virtualization makes the servers easier to manage in most cases and security may improve with virtualization as more VMs can create more information silos.

In larger organizations the management software integration issue has a greater impact as large scale management solutions are more complex to integrate. Microsoft has done a good job of integrating the System Center product suite right into the management of Hyper-V right out of the gate so this makes it pretty straight forward for an organization that is a homogeneous Microsoft environment.

In either case, it is great to see the growth of the needed support products for virtualization and this will continue to drive the success of virtualization solutions in all businesses.