As I was meeting with a customer recently, we got onto the topic of workload portability. It was interesting, we were discussing the various cloud providers, AWS, Azure, and VMware’s vCloud Air, primarily, and how could they, a VMware shop, move workloads in and out of various cloud providers.

Most industry analysts, and those of us on the front lines trying to make this all work, or help our customers make it work, will agree that we are in a transition phase. Many people smarter than I have talked at length about how virtualization and infrastructure as a service is a bridge to get us to a new way of application development and delivery, one where all applications are delivered from the cloud, and where development is constant and iterative. Imagine patch Tuesday every hour every day…

So how do we get there? Well if virtualization is simply a bridge, that begs the question of portability of workloads, virtual machines in this case. Looking at the problem objectively, we have started down that path previously with the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), but that requires a powered off Virtual Machine which is then exported, copied, and then imported to the new system which creates the proper format as part of the import process. But why can’t we just live migrate workloads without downtime between disparate hypervisors and clouds?

From my perspective the answer is simple, it is coming, it has to, but the vendors will hold out as long as they can. For some companies, the hypervisor battle is still waging. I think it is safe to say we are seeing the commoditization of the hypervisor. As we look at VMware’s products, they are moving from being a hypervisor company, again nothing insider here, just review the expansion into cloud management, network and storage virtualization, application delivery, and so much more, but more and more they are able to manage other vendors hypervisors. We are seeing more focus on “Cloud Management Platforms”, and everyone wants to manage any hypervisor. It has to follow then that some standards emerge around the hypervisor, virtual hard drives, the whole stack so we can start moving within our own datacenters.

This does seem counter intuitive, but if we put this into perspective, there is very little advantage in consolidation at this point. Most companies are as consolidated as they will get, we are now just working to get many of them to the final 10% or so. It is rare to find a company who is not virtualizing production workloads now, so now we need to look at what is next. Standards must prevail as they have in the physical compute, network, and storage platforms. This doesn’t negate the value of the hypervisor, but it does provide for choice, and differentiation around features and support.

I don’t suspect we will see this happen anytime soon, but it begs the question of why not? It would seem to be the logical progression.