“Virtualisation is the highest-impact issue changing infrastructure and operations through 2012,” a Gartner report* issued early last year blithely states. “It will change how you manage, how and what you buy, how you deploy, how you plan and how you charge. It will also shake up licensing, pricing and component management.”

If it could wake you up gently and make you a cuppa, we may finally be onto something here... Seriously though, according to Gartner: “Infrastructure is on an inevitable shift from components that are physically integrated by vendors (for example, monolithic servers) or manually integrated by users to logically composed “fabrics” of computing, I/O and storage components. As virtualisation matures, the “next big thing” will be automating the composition and management of the virtualised resources.