Virtualization is on everybody's mind. And with good reason. It's a critical, sea-changing concept with wide-reaching implications. The idea that you can make pools of dynamic resources with unlimited capacity available to users anywhere at anytime is extraordinary.

Because it is so vital, Microsoft is committed to driving the adoption of virtualization. However, unlike today's conventional wisdom, we don't view virtualization as an isolated, tactical tool. Rather, since virtualization can have a profound impact on your entire operations, from the data center to the desktop, we believe it should be embraced as part of an enterprise-wide infrastructure strategy.

At Microsoft, virtualization is a means to enabling our long-standing vision of Dynamic IT, where people and computers get the resources they need the moment they need them. That's why we're applying company-wide resources - in everything from product development and licensing strategies to interoperability initiatives and strategic partnerships - to make virtualization a reality for all of our customers.

Harnessing Virtualization to Meet Dynamic Business Demands

The trend is clear: As computing becomes more ubiquitous, more powerful and more portable, it is dramatically improving businesses' ability to provide employees with the capabilities needed to capitalize on new opportunities. At the same time, however, the cost and complexity of managing all of this has never been higher. For IT departments, the result is a growing number of contradictory requirements: agility and ease of access vs. security and compliance; performance vs. cost; innovation vs. reliability and continuity. In many ways, the biggest challenge that IT professionals face today is resolving the tension inherent in trying to create an information infrastructure that provides both flexibility and control.

Helping IT professionals find the right balance between these seemingly mutually exclusive imperatives is one of Microsoft's most important priorities. To do that, we are focused on technology innovation that will enable businesses to build dynamic IT systems that have the flexibility, intelligence, speed and power to adapt to changing business conditions, while providing the control that is so imperative to success.

In order to achieve Dynamic IT, companies need a virtualization strategy that mobilizes and manages the resources of the entire infrastructure, both virtual and physical, to meet fast-moving business demands. The right virtualization strategy - applied within an effective licensing structure - can enable IT to deliver faster and more reliable service, free up critical resources to address larger business goals, reduce costs, and ultimately achieve competitive advantage through business agility.

To learn more about how virtualization can help you address specific work scenarios, click here.

Effective Virtualization: Creating the Foundation for Dynamic IT

The concept of virtualization is not as new as some people may think: virtual machine technology for time-sharing on mainframes dates back to the 1960s. It's the confluence of challenging business demands and the emergence of virtualization technologies that span the entire stack, that is making virtualization so essential for today's organizations.

The most commonly cited benefit of virtualization is cost reduction. While this can be significant, saving money is just a part of the value virtualization can deliver. We feel strongly that virtualization is a transformational technology that, if effectively employed, can help companies create IT systems that are not only highly efficient and cost effective, but that have the self-awareness to adapt automatically and instantly to deliver the capabilities needed as business conditions change.

To make this possible, virtualization - the act of isolating or unbinding one computing resource from others - should be applied to all layers of a computing stack, from the data center to the desktop. Rather than locking the various layers together - the operating system (OS) to the hardware, the application to the OS, and the user interface to the local machine - we employ virtualization to loosen the direct reliance these parts have on each other.

The complete virtualization stack

Such data center-to-desktop virtualization makes it possible to quickly deploy new capabilities without needing to acquire new hardware and configure components. Testing requirements and application compatibility issues are reduced, automating processes is simplified, and disaster recovery capabilities are easier to implement. On the desktop, virtualization can help create an infrastructure that enables employees to access the applications they need, no matter where they are located.

However, along with these tremendous benefits, virtualization can actually add much more complexity and cost to your environment. Think of virtualization as supercharging your IT engine. Everything has more power, speed and flexibility. But because they are virtualized, you may not know where your assets reside, how many you really have - think virtual machine sprawl, or how to juggle and optimize them. Experience has taught us that, the more you virtualize, the more essential management becomes. This cannot be overstated. Without strong management capabilities, the benefits you gain from virtualization technologies will be greatly diminished. Management is glue that brings everything together and unlocks virtualization's real potential. Not only does it pinpoint where virtualization products reside since they are no longer tied to a single location, it lets you easily allocate the right resources to the right people in real-time. And because your infrastructure will still have physical components, effective management solutions must enable you to control both physical and virtual worlds in a unified, easy manner.

The real power of virtualization comes when companies implement an integrated virtualization strategy that extends across their IT infrastructure, along with management solutions that span both virtual and physical resources. Only then can you effectively leverage virtualization as a building block for Dynamic IT.

Microsoft's Virtualization Commitment

Microsoft's virtualization products address customer needs from the data center to the desktop. For the data center, we offer Microsoft Virtual Server and we recently announced beta availability and the upcoming launch of our enterprise-quality Hyper-V hypervisor, which will be a key feature of Microsoft Windows Server 2008. On the desktop side, Microsoft Terminal Services virtualizes the presentation process, and Microsoft Application Virtualization lets you run applications without installing them on desktops.

With Microsoft System Center, you can manage both physical and virtual assets for clients and servers, all with the same platform. And by mid 2008, you'll be able to use it to manage multiple hypervisors. The combination of these data center and desktop virtualization products, orchestrated by our management tools, will solve many critical issues our customers face and build the foundation for a Dynamic IT environment.

In the end, virtualization and Dynamic IT are all about helping you provide the resources people need at a moment's notice, and making your organization much more agile so you can achieve goals that simply weren't possible before. With Microsoft virtualization, virtually anything is possible.