Virtualization @ Home - 5 Year Outlook
As most everyone knows by now virualization has quickly become the hot topic of last year. For those who remained unaware, IT teams everywhere have started to evaluate or implement virualization of many of their servers to safe both time and money.
Products such as VMWare or Microsoft Virtual Server will be used more heavily in the upcomming years to help cut costs and increase efficient of datacenters and server farms… but what about virtualization at home?
It is now much more common to see each family member with their own PC at home. This means in a family of 5 there could possible be 5 machines and at one more in the living room (ie. Apple TV, high powered game console, etc).
Let’s pretend just for the time that everyone uses sleep mode and power consumption is not an issue. Even then how much time is spent maintaining and upgrading theses machines? If we estimate that each PC is replaced or upgraded every 3 years, that would mean about every six months there is a machine in for repairs. Also, how many people can honestly say all of their home machines have backups regularly taken?
What if all of those machines could be replaced by 1 server class machine. This is eliminate constant upgrades, reduce the cost of owning redundant hardware, yield access to a large pool of resources, and ease the burden of backups. This would be virtualization at home and it sounds like a great plan to me…
Keep your eyes on VMWare and Microsoft, when they make their products easy for a home user to implement we may be in for a huge shift in the consumer PC market