There are plenty of reasons that companies can give for keeping virtualization at an arm’s length instead of embracing it. In my conversations with customers, it’s difficult to find somebody that is not working with virtualization at some level.

But what keeps it from moving out of the lab and into production. Or, more succinctly, where is the mythical "line in the sand" that keeps people from moving applications. We know that things like file and print services, web services messaging and network infrastructure are all areas where customers are virtualizing. However there seems to be some "off limits" applications.

In some cases, these may be line of business applications where the application vendor specifically calls out that they will not support the application in a virtualized environment. Typically this has more to do with their own reluctance to support it than the fact that it won’t run on a virtual machine.

However, one line in the sand is performance. How many times have you heard someone say "I’m not willing to take the performance hit to run this application virtualized, I need the performance of a physical server"?

Well, that excuse is getting harder and harder to accept as the performance of a virtualized environment keeps getting closer and closer to the physical performance.

As a matter of fact, this week VMware released a new performance benchmark that shows web and Java services running faster on an HP DL585 G5 server (which is AMD Opteron processor-based, of course) than the performance of the same applications running "bare metal" – directly on a physical system. Under VMware ESX 3.5 the performance just edges out the previous benchmark by a hair.

Virtualized applications beating the same applications on physical servers? Is the end of the world as we know it? To some degree, yes, but in a good way. We’re seeing the beginning of a new era, where virtualization becomes the norm for just about any workload, and the differences between the physical and virtual worlds become more blurred. By the way you can attribute this success to features like AMD-V Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) and VMware’s optimized use of this technology.

Does this mean that all applications should be expected to run at native speeds in a virtualized environment? No, but more and more, that gap is quickly closing. We’re headed in that direction, in our quest for the holy grail of virtualization.

It’s going to be an interesting year, King Arthur would want a ring side seat for this one.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.