Commentary on "Virtualization Means Different Things To Different Observers"

Fredric Paul of bMighty.com pointed out something in his recent post, Virtualization Means Different Things To Different Observer that marketeers from suppliers of virtualization technology would be wise to understand. Virtualization is a layer cake of technologies that have a long history in organizational datacenters it is not just virtual machine software.

The author notes that recent announcements are a confusing mess of virtual machine software combined with storage virtualization, virtual machine software combined with management of virtualized resources or some other combination of the six different layers of virtualization technology we're tracking here.

This confusion in the market is not new. I've been commenting on it for well over 15 years and am always amazed that the industry can not come up with a better way to speak about each of the layers of virtualization technology that, when taken together, allow computing to operate in a logical or virtual environment rather than merely a physical environment.

Have you found the conversation centering on the topic of virtualization to be really confusing in your organization? Can you point to a group of obvious causes of this issue?

I'm headed off to the Symantec ManageFusion conference today. I'll be at the conference for a couple of days. When I learn something of interest, I'll post it here.