Summary of the Article
- By 2025, AI will revolutionize virtual machine management with self-healing capabilities and predictive resource allocation, reducing downtime by up to 75%.
- Hardware innovations will bring specialized VM processors and memory disaggregation technologies, dramatically improving performance for specific workloads.
- The Broadcom acquisition of VMware has accelerated the adoption of alternative hypervisors, with open-source solutions gaining significant enterprise traction.
- Zero-trust security frameworks will become standard for VMs, with micro-segmentation and real-time attestation protecting against sophisticated threats.
- RedHat OpenShift’s unified platform approach provides organizations a clear path forward for VM modernization while protecting existing investments.
The virtual machine landscape is undergoing its most significant transformation since the technology’s mainstream adoption. As we approach 2025, organizations face crucial decisions about protecting their VM investments while embracing innovation. The industry shifts we’re witnessing today—from AI integration to the aftermath of the Broadcom-VMware acquisition—will fundamentally reshape virtualization strategies for years to come.
Over 85% of businesses will keep a large VM footprint into 2025 and beyond, according to industry insiders, despite the rising trend of containerization. The main distinction will be how these businesses adapt their virtualization strategy to support modern application architectures instead of competing with them. RedHat is leading this evolution, providing solutions that connect traditional VMs with cloud-native innovations.
Looking Ahead: Virtual Machines in 2025
Virtual machines have been a staple of business computing for almost 20 years, but they’re now evolving faster than ever. By 2025, we expect to see virtual machines that are smarter, more secure, and more closely tied to the hardware they run on than ever before. This isn’t just about making small improvements—it’s about completely reimagining what’s possible with virtualization.
Companies at the forefront of their industries are already getting ready for this change. They’re putting their money into platforms that can handle both traditional VM workloads and containerized applications at the same time, with unified management and security. This mixed approach acknowledges that different workloads have different needs, and trying to fit everything into containers or keeping everything in VMs creates unneeded technical debt.
Artificial Intelligence Will Revolutionize Virtual Machine Management
The biggest shakeup in virtualization is the full integration of artificial intelligence into every part of managing virtual machines. AI won’t just be a bonus feature in VM platforms – it will be the backbone of how virtual infrastructure runs, learns, and adjusts to different situations.
Self-Healing VMs Will Be the Norm
By 2025, self-healing abilities will be a common feature on major virtualization platforms. These smart systems will constantly check VM health metrics, spotting potential failures before they happen and automatically putting remediation actions into effect. Early versions are already producing impressive results, with some businesses reporting up to a 75% decrease in VM-related downtime. For instance, Microsoft’s gaming revolution showcases how advanced virtual machine technologies are reshaping industries.
This tech operates by setting up foundational performance measurements for each VM and utilizing machine learning to pinpoint irregularities that suggest possible issues. Upon detection, the system has the ability to automatically transfer workloads, modify resource distributions, or fix damaged parts without the need for human interference. For IT groups, this results in fewer late-night alerts and more strategic concentration.
AI Models for Predictive Resource Allocation
By 2025, static resource allocation will be obsolete, replaced by AI-driven predictive models. These advanced systems will analyze past usage patterns, application requirements, and business cycles to dynamically adjust CPU, memory, and storage allocations in real-time. The result is a significant improvement in resource utilization, with early adopters reporting increases of 30-40%, while maintaining or improving application performance.
What is particularly useful about this technology is its capacity for continuous learning. Every resource adjustment becomes a data point that refines the AI model, making predictions more accurate over time. For businesses with thousands of virtual machines, the efficiency improvements can mean millions of dollars in infrastructure savings each year.
Virtual Machines Configured Through Conversational AI
By 2025, system administrators will be able to manage virtual machines through conversational AI interfaces, thanks to large language models. Instead of having to navigate through complex configuration screens or write scripts, administrators will just need to describe what they want, and AI assistants will take care of the rest. This will make managing virtual machines more accessible to a wider range of people, improve consistency, and reduce human error.
“Virtual machine management of the future is not about adding more buttons and settings. It’s about reducing them. The direction we’re heading in is intent-based systems. You just tell the platform what you want to achieve, and AI takes care of the complexity of making it a reality.”
— Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing
Even at this early stage, these systems have shown they can convert natural language requests such as “Create a high-availability VM cluster for our SQL database with proper resource isolation” into the correct configurations for compute, storage, and network resources. By 2025, these capabilities will have grown to deal with increasingly complex situations, including troubleshooting and optimization tasks.
Hardware and Virtual Machines Become One in 2025
The once clear line between hardware and virtual machines is quickly fading. By 2025, we can expect to see never-before-seen levels of connection between the physical and virtualization layers. This will provide major performance benefits for companies that are willing to invest in systems built for this purpose. This change represents a move away from the previous “hardware-agnostic” philosophy that was a major part of early virtualization.
Hardware manufacturers are starting to produce components that are specifically designed for virtualization tasks, acknowledging that generic hardware designs can often lead to problems in virtual environments. This specialized approach can result in much better performance, security, and efficiency than what you would get with general-purpose systems.
GPU Passthrough Will Be Effortless
By 2025, GPU virtualization technologies will have matured significantly, and effortless passthrough will become the norm for AI and graphics-heavy workloads. The current restrictions on GPU sharing and VM migration with attached GPUs will be mostly removed due to improvements in hardware design and hypervisor capabilities. As a result, VMs accelerated by GPUs will be as flexible and manageable as traditional CPU-only virtual machines.
Three major tech companies, NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, are all hard at work developing virtualization-aware GPU architectures. These architectures will support fine-grained resource allocation and live migration capabilities, which will be critical for organizations that run machine learning workflows, graphics rendering, and other compute-intensive applications in virtualized environments.
Advancements in VM Security at the Silicon Level
Companies that manufacture processors are integrating more and more advanced security features for virtualization directly into silicon. In 2025, these features will include VM isolation enforced by hardware, encrypted memory spaces for VMs, and secure enclaves for processing workloads that are sensitive. These protections at the silicon level provide guarantees of security that approaches that only use software cannot compete with.
Early versions of these technologies are represented by AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Intel’s Trust Domain Extensions (TDX), but by 2025, they will be much more comprehensive. The next generation will provide protection throughout the entire lifecycle of the virtual machine (VM) and include capabilities for attestation that is verified by hardware to validate the integrity of the VM.
VM-Specific Processors to Become Available
In 2025, we can expect to see specialized processors that are specifically designed for virtual machine workloads. These chips will not be like the general-purpose CPUs we are used to. Instead, they will be optimized for quick context switching, memory isolation, and virtualization instruction sets. Early benchmarks indicate that these processors, which are built for a specific purpose, can provide up to 40% better performance in environments heavy with VM compared to the traditional server CPUs.
These unique processors will also have built-in circuits for standard virtualization operations like live migration, memory page sharing, and snapshot creation. This will lead to a significant increase in density and responsiveness for environments running hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines.
Memory Disaggregation Technologies
Memory disaggregation—the capacity to pool and dynamically allocate memory resources across physical servers—will revolutionize the management of VM resources by 2025. This technology enables VMs to access memory beyond the physical limits of their host server, creating unparalleled flexibility in resource allocation and utilization. For more insights into the future of cloud computing, explore how Netflix’s virtual infrastructure is shaping the industry.
While companies like TidalScale and MemVerge have already begun to show what’s possible, by 2025, we expect to see memory disaggregation natively supported by the major hypervisors. This will be especially beneficial for memory-intensive workloads such as in-memory databases and real-time analytics.
Cloud-Native VM Architectures Take the Spotlight
The artificial separation between containers and virtual machines continues to become less defined. By 2025, we’ll see fully cloud-native VM architectures that merge the security and isolation benefits of traditional virtualization with the orchestration and deployment model of containers. This development represents a practical acknowledgment that both technologies have strengths that complement each other.
Companies are more and more looking for single platforms that can handle both VM and container workloads with uniform security policies, networking, and storage. This merging lets businesses update applications at their own speed without having to keep completely separate infrastructure stacks.
Hybrid Solutions Involving Kubernetes and Virtual Machines Will Reach Maturity
By the year 2025, it will be a common occurrence for Kubernetes to manage both applications that are containerized and virtual machines using a unified control plane. Projects such as KubeVirt and Virtlet that are experimental in nature today will have evolved into solutions that are ready for enterprise production. This convergence will enable organizations to use Kubernetes orchestration capabilities for their entire application portfolio, regardless of whether the workloads are running in containers or VMs.
Describing VMs as Kubernetes resources offers many operational benefits, such as the consistent application of policies, integrated monitoring, and simplified management. For many businesses, this method combines the best of both worlds: the maturity and compatibility of VMs with the agility of container deployment.
Seamless Multi-Cloud VM Portability
By 2025, the dream of multi-cloud VM portability—moving virtual machines from one provider to another without any changes—will become a reality. Progress in standardized VM formats, cross-cloud networking, and storage abstraction layers will remove many of the obstacles to cloud mobility. Businesses will use this ability to avoid being locked into one vendor and to optimize workload placement based on cost and performance needs. For more insights, you can read about virtualization 2025 and beyond.
Standardized VM runtime environments, which can execute across different infrastructures without modification, will be the main innovation that enables this portability. Projects such as Cloud Hypervisor are currently laying the foundation for this capability, but they will be mature enough for mission-critical applications by 2025.
Virtual Machine Security Embraces Zero Trust
By 2025, the way we secure virtual machines will look very different, with zero trust becoming the norm. The old-fashioned approach of securing the perimeter simply doesn’t work when workloads are moving around and spread out. In a zero trust model, nothing and no one—inside or outside the network—is trusted by default, and every access attempt has to be verified.
Experts believe that the change is due to the understanding that compromise is unavoidable in complex settings. The emphasis has shifted from stopping breaches to reducing their effect through detailed controls and constant surveillance. In the case of VM environments, this entails implementing security at various levels: the hypervisor, the guest OS, applications, and data.
By the year 2025, companies who do not adopt zero trust policies for their virtual machine infrastructure will be at risk for higher costs associated with breaches and will face more challenges in terms of compliance. Regulations are already changing to require many of these controls, especially for companies that deal with sensitive data.
Micro-Segmentation of VMs Extends Past Network Controls
Micro-segmentation is predicted to grow past just basic network controls, and will include security policies that are aware of the application and that follow VMs no matter where they are. The controls of the future will use analysis of behavior to find anomalies and automatically change security stances in response to threats. The level of control will reach individual processes within VMs, not just network communications between them.
Top-tier vendors are currently working on solutions that can directly integrate with hypervisors to implement these controls without the need for agents inside each VM. This method decreases performance overhead and enhances security coverage and consistency. By the year 2025, these features will be a standard part of enterprise virtualization platforms.
Continuous Verification for All Virtual Machines
Experts predict that by 2025, continuous verification will be an essential security control. This is the process of checking the security and integrity of a virtual machine throughout its lifecycle. It ensures that the virtual machine has not been tampered with, is running authorized code, and that all security controls are properly configured and working. This verification happens all the time, not just when the machine is booted up, allowing for instant detection of any security drift or compromise.
This method uses encryption methods to provide confirmable proof of the state of the virtual machine, usually rooted in hardware security modules for the best protection. If the attestation is not successful, automated remediation workflows can return the virtual machines to a known and safe state or separate them for more analysis.
Quantum-Proof Encryption for VM Data
Quantum computing poses a real and present danger to existing encryption algorithms. This has spurred the uptake of quantum-proof encryption for VM storage and communications. By 2025, organizations dealing with sensitive data will have to use post-quantum cryptography to safeguard VM images, storage, and network traffic. This shift is a major task for large virtualized environments and calls for meticulous planning and execution. For more insights on virtual infrastructure, check out the real cost of cloud computing.
It is anticipated that the standardization process for post-quantum cryptography by NIST will finalize a number of quantum-resistant algorithms by 2024. This will give vendors the opportunity to incorporate them into releases for 2025. It is recommended that organizations start reviewing their cryptographic inventory at this time in order to identify systems that will need to be updated when these standards are finalized.
Edge Computing Will Drive Virtual Machine Evolution
By 2025, the rise of edge computing will spark major advances in virtual machine (VM) technology. Conventional virtualization platforms often require too many resources for edge environments, which usually have limitations in terms of power usage, connectivity, and physical space. We’ll see the development of new VM models that are lightweight and created specifically for edge applications. These will offer the security and isolation advantages of virtualization, but with significantly less overhead.
Companies will be able to utilize consistent management practices across their core data centers and their thousands of edge locations thanks to this progression. The ability to use VM tools and processes that are already familiar across the entire compute spectrum, from the cloud to the edge, will simplify operations and improve security posture.
Edge VM Deployments Powered by 5G
With the introduction of 5G networks, edge VM deployments will speed up, as these distributed environments need high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity. By 2025, telecom providers will provide edge compute platforms that are directly integrated with their 5G infrastructure. This will allow organizations to deploy VMs that are physically close to users and devices. These edge locations will usually host 10-50 VMs that provide localized services while still being connected to central management systems.
When 5G and edge virtualization join forces, they will pave the way for innovative applications that need almost instantaneous processing. These include augmented reality, self-driving cars, and smart city infrastructure. As these capabilities become available, organizations should start pinpointing workloads that would profit from edge deployment.
Super-Light VM Runtimes for IoT
By 2025, we’re expecting to see specialized VM runtimes that are designed specifically for IoT and embedded systems. These super-light implementations will deliver VM-level isolation with memory footprints that are measured in megabytes instead of gigabytes. This efficiency will enable organizations to apply VM security benefits to environments that were previously bare-metal without needing hardware upgrades. For more insights, read about Nutanix Cloud Clusters and their impact on VM environments.
Initiatives such as Firecracker and Cloud Hypervisor are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this trend. By 2025, we can expect to see bespoke solutions designed for industrial IoT, medical devices and other niche environments. These solutions will prioritise quick boot times, predictable performance and powerful remote management capabilities.
Self-sufficient Edge VM Management
By 2025, edge VM environments will demand self-sufficient management capabilities that can function during network failures and with little human interaction. AI-powered management systems will take care of everyday tasks such as patching, scaling, and failover without needing a connection to central management systems. This self-sufficiency is crucial for edge deployments in remote or challenging settings where on-site technical support is not feasible.
These self-governing systems will employ complex policy engines to make choices based on local conditions while adhering to company standards. When they regain connectivity, they will sync up with central management systems and implement any updated policies or configurations.
Virtual Machines Emphasize Energy Efficiency
By 2025, sustainability will be a key factor in the design of virtualization platforms, due to both environmental and economic concerns. Power consumption often makes up 30-40% of the operating costs of a data center, making energy efficiency not only environmentally friendly, but also a major financial consideration. To meet these needs, virtualization vendors are introducing features specifically designed to reduce energy consumption without sacrificing performance.
Companies will start to consider energy efficiency when choosing a virtualization platform, looking at overall power use as well as traditional metrics like performance and features. This change is due to an increased understanding of the environmental effects of computing and regulations pushing for a reduction in carbon emissions.
Environmentally-Friendly VM Scheduling
By the year 2025, environmentally-friendly VM scheduling will be a common feature in most virtualization platforms. These smart systems will automatically position and move workloads to get the most out of renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions. For companies with infrastructure spread across different geographical locations, this feature can greatly cut down emissions by moving compute resources to places where there is currently a lot of clean energy. For more insights, you can explore Red Hat’s perspective on virtualization in 2025 and beyond.
This tech functions by merging live data about grid energy sources with VM placement decisions. When there is a high level of solar or wind generation in a specific area, the system gives priority to that location for new workloads or migrations. Initial applications have shown carbon reductions of 15-30% with a minimal impact on performance.
Energy Use Analysis for Virtual Machines
By 2025, it will be standard to have detailed energy use analysis for each virtual machine. This will allow companies to assign energy costs to specific apps and departments. This will give an unprecedented level of insight into how computing resources contribute to total energy use and carbon emissions. With this information, companies can pinpoint inefficient apps and optimize how they allocate resources.
These analytics will go beyond just analyzing CPU utilization metrics. They will also take into account memory, storage I/O, and network traffic patterns when estimating power consumption. Over time, machine learning algorithms will use actual infrastructure power measurements to continuously refine these estimates. This will lead to the creation of increasingly accurate models.
Speeding Up the VMware Alternative Movement
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has prompted a major change in the virtualization landscape, with many companies actively considering alternative platforms. This trend will speed up through 2025 as licensing changes and support policies continue to develop under Broadcom’s ownership. The market disruption is both a challenge for organizations heavily invested in VMware technology and a chance for competing platforms to increase their market share.
Companies are taking different paths to this change. Some are completely changing their platforms, while others are using multi-hypervisor strategies to reduce their reliance on a single vendor. The most successful changes prioritize application compatibility and operational continuity over technical elegance.
The shift in the market will probably have a long-term effect on the virtualization landscape, making it more diverse with multiple viable enterprise platforms instead of one dominant vendor. For IT leaders, this diversity provides more options but also demands a more careful evaluation of long-term platform strategies.
Open Source Hypervisors Gain More Ground in the Enterprise
By 2025, we’ll see open source hypervisors like KVM and Xen powering an even larger share of enterprise workloads. These platforms have come a long way in recent years, with powerful management tools and enterprise support options now available from a variety of vendors. Businesses are getting more comfortable with open source infrastructure components, seeing the advantages of community-driven development and freedom from vendor lock-in.
This transformation is made possible by the creation of enterprise-grade management platforms that offer the operational capabilities that organizations need. Red Hat Virtualization, Nutanix AHV, and Scale Computing HC3 show that open source hypervisors can provide reliability and features that are as good as those of proprietary alternatives, but at a lower cost.
The Aftermath of Broadcom’s Strategy for VMware
By 2025, the repercussions of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware will be fully realized, transforming the dynamics of the market and customer relationships. Despite Broadcom’s public commitment to continue investing in VMware’s product portfolio, there is still a lot of concern among customers about possible changes to licensing models, support policies, and product roadmaps. Even organizations planning to stick with VMware technologies are being driven to plan for contingencies due to these concerns.
Experts in the field anticipate that the biggest shifts will impact business contracts and support systems more than the fundamental technologies. Companies with extensive VMware usage should take special note of their contract terms and renewal dates, using these moments to negotiate better terms or consider other options.
Switching Hypervisors Made Easier with Migration Tools
By 2025, advanced migration tools will be available, making it much easier to shift workloads between hypervisors. These tools will automate the conversion process, while maintaining performance characteristics, security configurations, and integration points. For businesses considering changing platforms, these features will lower both risk and cost and speed up the transition process. As the real cost of cloud computing continues to be a significant consideration, such advancements are crucial for efficient and economical transitions.
VM Skills Gap Increases
By 2025, the virtualization skills scene will have significantly changed, creating both obstacles and opportunities for IT professionals. As basic VM management tasks become more and more automated, the need for entry-level virtualization specialists will decrease. At the same time, companies will face increasing shortages of experts who can design and implement complex multi-platform environments that combine VMs, containers, and cloud-native services.
The current split in the job market is a clear indication of the larger shift towards automation and abstraction of infrastructure. What used to be specialized knowledge needed for everyday tasks is now being taken care of by smart platforms. However, more complicated architectural decisions now require a more profound understanding of multiple fields.
Progressive IT leaders are already putting money into skills development programs to assist their teams in making this transition. The most useful skills combine expertise in virtualization with related areas such as cloud architecture, security, and automation.
Automation Will Cut the Number of Basic VM Jobs
Automation will do away with as many as 70% of routine VM management tasks by 2025, which will completely alter the way people get into virtualization careers. Tasks like VM provisioning, capacity management, and basic troubleshooting will be mostly managed by smart platforms that use AI and policy-based controls. This change will lower the need for specialists who only focus on daily VM operations.
Companies should gear up for this shift by creating well-defined career advancement opportunities that assist operations staff in gaining more valuable skills. The teams that will thrive are those that see automation as a tool to concentrate on strategic projects, rather than as a risk to job stability.
Hybrid Container-VM Specialists Will Be Highly Sought After
By 2025, professionals who can successfully design and manage hybrid environments that include both VMs and containers will be highly sought after and will be able to command top dollar. These specialists are knowledgeable about the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and are able to design solutions that use the most appropriate technology for each workload. They have expertise in areas such as service mesh implementation, cross-platform security, and consistent operational models across heterogeneous infrastructure.
Skills that will be highly sought after include a thorough understanding of Kubernetes operators for VMs, unified networking methodologies, and security models that are platform-agnostic. Companies should pinpoint team members with high potential and cultivate these skills through training, certification, and practical project experience.
Start Planning Today: Your Virtual Machine Strategy for 2025
Companies that want to stay competitive in the changing world of virtualization should start preparing today. Moving to the next generation of virtual machine capabilities will require careful planning, skills training, and strategic investment in technology. By taking a proactive approach, IT leaders can make sure their virtualization infrastructure continues to meet business needs while keeping costs under control and managing risk.
Companies that are most likely to succeed will take a step-by-step approach to modernization, focusing on use cases that provide clear benefits. This practical approach allows teams to build expertise and confidence while delivering tangible business outcomes at each step of the journey.
Investing in Today’s Technologies for Tomorrow’s Success
There are a handful of important technologies available today that are predicted to be the backbone of successful VM strategies in 2025. Investing in these areas now will put companies in a good position to incorporate next-generation capabilities as they are developed and become available. For example, understanding the real cost of cloud computing can be crucial for making informed investment decisions.
- API-driven automation platforms that support both VMs and containers
- Unified management tools that work across on-premises and cloud environments
- Zero-trust security frameworks that protect workloads regardless of location
- Infrastructure-as-code capabilities for consistent VM deployment and configuration
- VM-to-container migration tools to support gradual application modernization
Organizations should evaluate these technologies not just on current capabilities but also on roadmap alignment with the trends discussed in this article. Vendor commitment to open standards and cross-platform compatibility is particularly important in this rapidly evolving landscape.
By adopting these fundamental technologies early on, companies can reap immediate operational advantages while also developing the skills necessary for more complex implementations. Many businesses discover that automation and unified management tools offer quick returns on investment due to efficiency improvements, making them appealing as initial steps.
Essential Skills for Your Team
Virtualization skills gap is a hurdle that proactive organizations can turn into an opportunity. IT leaders who invest in specific skills development now will be preparing their teams for success in 2025. They will also be gaining an edge over their competitors through superior operational capabilities. The most sought-after skills will be those that combine deep technical expertise with a broader understanding of business requirements and architectural principles.
Virtual Machine Evaluation Guidelines for Decision Making
Companies should establish a systematic evaluation guideline to aid in virtual machine-related decisions for 2025 and the future. This guideline should take into account workload features, business needs, and company limitations to establish the best method for each application. By using a uniform set of evaluation criteria, IT directors can prevent both early migrations that offer little benefit and postponed modernization that results in technical debt.
Common Questions
As companies traverse the ever-changing world of virtualization, there are several questions that often come up regarding the future of VM technology. These questions represent the strategic concerns of IT leaders who must balance innovation with practical operational considerations.
The insights shared here are the collective agreement based on current industry trends and expert analysis. However, every organization should view these insights in light of their specific needs and limitations.
Could containers overtake virtual machines by 2025?
It is unlikely that containers will supersede VMs by 2025, but the dynamic between these technologies will undoubtedly continue to progress. Although containers will become the favored deployment model for a significant number of new applications, VMs will still be crucial for legacy workloads, specialized operating systems, and situations that necessitate robust workload isolation. The most successful organizations will strategically utilize both technologies, choosing the most appropriate method for each workload based on its unique needs.
Through 2025, we’re going to see a rise in hybrid architectures where containers are either running inside VMs or next to them under one management system. This strategy brings together the deployment speed and density of containers with the isolation and compatibility advantages of VMs. Instead of seeing these technologies as rivals, progressive businesses view them as complementary components of a holistic application platform.
What effect will AI have on the cost of virtual machines?
By 2025, AI will have a significant impact on reducing the cost of virtual machines. This will be achieved through better resource utilization, automated management, and predictive maintenance. Companies that have adopted AI-driven VM management report savings of 25-40% on infrastructure. This is due to more efficient resource allocation, reduced overprovisioning, and lower operational overhead. These savings more than make up for the initial investment in AI capabilities. This is especially true for large environments with hundreds or thousands of VMs.
What are the biggest VM security threats to expect in 2025?
Looking ahead to 2025, the biggest threats to VM security will likely be hypervisor escape vulnerabilities, supply chain attacks on VM images, and advanced persistent threats that take advantage of workload mobility. To prepare, organizations should put in place thorough security frameworks that include ongoing vulnerability management, runtime protection, and zero-trust access controls. It will be especially important to secure the VM lifecycle from the creation of the image to its retirement, as attackers are more and more often targeting these operational processes instead of running VMs.
Which hypervisors are predicted to increase in market share in 2025?
Open source hypervisors, especially those based on KVM, are predicted to see a significant increase in market share by 2025. This increase will be fueled by both technical maturity and market dynamics, including the reaction to Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Enterprise distributions of these open source technologies—like those from Red Hat, Nutanix, and Scale Computing—are expected to be particularly popular as companies look for alternatives that offer enterprise support and management capabilities. Hypervisors from cloud providers are also expected to continue to grow as more workloads are moved to public and hybrid cloud environments.
What does VM technology have in store for sustainability?
By 2025, virtualization platforms will be equipped with advanced sustainability features such as carbon-aware scheduling, power-optimized resource management, and comprehensive energy consumption reporting. These features will enable organizations to decrease the environmental footprint of their computing infrastructure while also reducing energy costs. The most sophisticated applications will interact with facility management systems to enhance the overall efficiency of data centers, taking into account aspects like cooling needs along with direct compute energy consumption.
Companies need to assess virtualization platforms based not only on their existing sustainability features but also on their future plans in this field. A vendor’s commitment to research and development in energy efficiency is a good sign of their future potential and their ability to meet upcoming regulatory requirements.
Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, virtual machines will continue to be a vital part of business infrastructure. They will adapt to meet new needs, rather than being phased out. By recognizing these trends and planning accordingly, businesses can ensure that their investments in virtualization continue to provide value in a more and more complex tech environment.
