For years now server virtualization has been a core technology for larger companies. It’s provided the opportunity for businesses to reduce operating as well as capital costs, and offered them great flexibility and scalability. In more recent times, server virtualization has made its way to the enterprise, as well.

Virtualization at the desktop level, however, has been much slower in coming. Businesses that have already implemented server virtualization technologies are sometimes hesitant to let virtualization out of the data center and into the direct presence of users.

Organizational challenges
Desktop virtualization presents some challenges for the enterprise. Once virtualization has expanded out to the end user, it adds a significant overhead in monitoring, configuration, security and more.

To be sure, many enterprise IT departments are already deploying significant resources to support traditional desktop environments; indeed, desktop virtualization vendors would argue that a virtualized user experience creates less in the way of organizational overhead.

Performance
While virtualized servers can perform as well as (and often out-perform) standalone physical servers, the same hasn’t always been true of virtualized desktops. The tide is changing in this area, however. Virtualized desktops are becoming much more powerful while at the same time they’re becoming more manageable.

Beyond application servers and desktops
There are opportunities all across the enterprise to implement virtualization in order to create greater scalability and flexibility. Every layer of the computing stack that’s virtualized adds to the overall manageability, as well.

The biggest challenge for the enterprise is the current separation of powers. With hardware, network, applications and storage all controlling their own fiefdoms, it becomes somewhat threatening to think about dumping everything into one virtualization bucket. This is another organizational roadblock that the enterprise must overcome if it is to take full advantage of virtualization technology.

The way ahead
Organizations that really want to take advantage of the improved efficiencies, greater scalability and flexibility, increased security and reduced overhead that comes with virtualization need to identify and work to address the roadblocks to virtualization outside of the server and applications world. Only then can the enterprise get the full benefits of the technology.