Application Support is still the biggest challenge to Virtualization

From a hardware and software perspective the virtualization industry has made leaps and bounds over the last year with the support of hardware chipset technologies from AMD and Intel to support hypervisors which are coming on strong from Microsoft and VMWare.

However the biggest challenge still seems to be, will an Application Vendor take a support call when the application has a problem in a virtualized environment. A year ago there was a report called "Virtualization Industry Challenges", which walked through these problems, but around application support there is still quite a bit of work to do. Microsoft actually is one of the best at supporting the virtual environments, but clearly there are other problems. Some major vendors are so hostile to virtualization that they created their own hypervisor to allow their products inside VMs.

With the release of Hyper-V pretty soon, I am hopeful that a number of the larger application vendors will change the policy and pick up their phone to these calls. We will see.