If you're going to talk about virtualization, then it may be helpful to get some perspective on the relatively short history of the concept by reviewing the vision and predictions of one of the leading lights of the virtualization software development industry. That would be Dr. Mendel Rosenblum of Stanford University and co-founder of VMware, whom Om Malik has recently interviewed and posted an excerpt of here.

Still Chief Scientist with the company, Rosenblum is predictably rosy when it comes to the future of virtualization, saying "In 2008, I expect people to fully embrace virtualization and extend it to other parts of their businesses, even bringing it in-house and using it for optimizing their desktop infrastructure. More importantly, you will start to see the long-term impact of virtualization in the next 12 months."

I don't know that I consider 12 months long-term, even in the fast-paced world of IT, and I think he's probably ahead of schedule when it comes to people "fully embracing" the technology, but he's dead right when he's discussing the reasons for doing so: maximizing the utilization of costly resources is starting to be not just a feather in the CIO's cap but a necessary justification for the procurement of those resources.

Of course, there are still obstacles to viewing one's data center as one big consolidated computing resource; Rosenblum mentions one of the driving factors behind the current expansion and under-utilization of processing power, which is peak-load capacity, but virtualization doesn't really address this issue, it just moves it to another level of abstraction. Virtualization software may be one piece of the puzzle for solving that problem but it's not the solution in and of itself, and it's likely that it's going to take more than just 2008 to figure it all out.