Virtualization is all the rage as IT managers look to reduce capital and operating expenses within their data centers, and/or meet Green initiatives to reduce power consumption. Thirty percent of companies are decreasing the number of servers they support, while 93% of companies we recently interviewed have virtualized all or part of their application server platforms. Indeed many companies are now requiring any application they deploy to run on virtualization platforms from companies such as VMware, Microsoft, or Citrix.So with virtualization all the rage in the data center, why are so many telecom managers telling us that one of their chief complaints is the growing number of servers they need to deploy to support IP telephony and UC? We continue to hear complaints of server "bunny farms" and difficulty in centralizing call control servers into data centers due to scalability limitations. Why isn't the IP-PBX simply running as a process within a hypervisor on an internal (or external cloud)? After all, it's just software, right?
Speak to most IP-PBX manufacturers and they'll tell you the problem isn't the reliability of virtualized data centers, it's latency. Virtualization platforms aren't typically able to meet the low latency requirements necessary to support voice and/or video.
But that's starting to change. Earlier this month Mitel and VMWare announced that they would support "Mitel Communications Director" running on VMWare, becoming the first major commercial IP-PBX vendor to announce that its call processing server would run on a hypervisor. Last year Avaya introduced "Aura Systems Platform" for mid-sized customers, running several independent processes on a Xen-based virtualized appliance. Though Aura applications won't yet run on a general-purpose hypervisor, Avaya's move also represents another sign that virtualization and IPT/UC are starting to converge.
Solutions from other vendors are lacking, though a quick Google search will lead you to discussions about running OCS on Hyper-V or Cisco Unified Communications Manager on VMware, although at this point neither are "officially" supporting such a configuration in anything outside of a lab environment.
At the desktop things get a bit dicier. Here too interest is high, with approximately 40% of companies at some stage of virtual desktop deployment, while most of the rest are either evaluating or running a pilot. But while virtualization in the data center offers an clear-cut path to lower costs, virtualization on the desktop threatens to disrupt trends toward software-based voice and video.
The problem in a virtualized desktop environment is how to handle voice and video processing. In normal desktops, processing runs on the PC. But where do you convert voice and video to packets if all you are running locally is a virtual screen? Here too there are a few solutions, such as Mitel's "Unified IP Client for Sun Ray", Citrix's HDX RealTime for supporting locally connected USB devices, or thin-client devices from Wyse (supported by NEC) that localize voice and video processing in either a phone or DSP-equipped terminal server adapter.
Given the growing interest in virtualization, and perhaps more importantly, the growing success in leveraging virtualization to reduce costs, I expect that before the end of 2010 you will see options from most all leading IPT and UC vendors to not only support call and session management services in a hypervisor, but deliver software-based voice and video to a thin client. A little pressure from the customers couldn't hurt as well (wink wink).
