Virtualization has been one of the most talked about technologies across the globe. Many major companies globally have implemented virtualization on small, medium or large scales. However a major chunk of organizations in India are yet to tap the business efficiency potential that virtualization promises to offer.

The session on virtualization at Interop Mumbai 2009 drew a similar inference. The session was chaired by Zoeb Adenwala, Global CIO for Essel Propack. The company itself has implemented virtualization for its e-mail servers.

In his presentation titled ‘Virtualization – Deployments and Benefits,’ Kailash Jayaswal, Data Center Advisor, Choice Solutions observed how virtualization could provide a cost-effective, energy-efficient, high performance solution that can help organizations solve some of their Data Center woes.

Jayaswal suggested that adopting virtualization could help organizations reduce their physical server count and have most of these servers running as virtual machines on a smaller number of physical servers. Organizations could increase or decrease the number of virtual machines depending upon the requirement, thereby ensuring maximum utilization of existing hardware while reducing the need to invest in additional physical hardware.

In his presentation, Shehzad Merchant, Senior Director, Strategy, Extreme Networks illustrated how virtualization promised to solve some of the Data Center related issues, but it actually created some complexities at the networking level. However Merchant also spoke about how both vendors who are offering virtualization solutions and those offering network infrastructure solutions were working towards solving network-related issues.

Merchant explained that while virtualization offered a dynamic platform, the network is still a static platform designed, built and configured to specific requirements. To resolve switching issues, virtualization took switching at the server level through virtual switches.

While on one hand, this increased the load on the CPU with the additional processing of switching at the software level, it created conflicts at the physical network layer.

Merchant further added that vendor organizations are working towards resolving this issue. One of the solutions involves moving the switching mechanism onto the NIC card.

The presentation on ‘Enterprise Virtualization: Remote Infrastructure Management – The Next Step’ saw Avinash Sankholkar, Head Business Operations, Larsen & Toubro Infotech describing how Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) providers are adopting virtualization to design their own private clouds. Thus they can offer customers a flexible, cost-effective, yet high performance hosted IT infrastructure solution. Sankholkar explained how organizations could have 75 percent of their IT infrastructure outsourced with RIM and thereby reduce costs in terms of power consumption, fuel consumption and even real estate space.