Intensified usage of virtualized tasks diminishes memory resources

Intensified usage of virtualized tasks diminishes memory resources

In an interview, Michael Moreland, Crucial Server DRAM product manager, revealed that the majority of IT decision-makers are allocating 64GB of memory or more for their hungriest applications. These include big data, databases, content hosting, email, file sharing, content creation, and active directory.

The survey results indicate that virtualization has allowed businesses to cut down on costs, reduce carbon footprint, and provide optimal quality of service for customers. Nearly three in five (58%) IT professionals said that less than 60% of their physical servers are maxed out with memory.

The most common workloads currently being virtualised include virtualised databases (71%), file sharing (60%), email (58%), web hosting (54%), and big data (47%). However, a recent study by Crucial found that 46% of IT decision-makers in the UK, US, France, and Germany have insufficient memory to meet current workload demands.

Current trends in deep virtualization memory for IT professionals running multiple servers across industries involve a shift towards hybrid environments and balancing performance, security, and cost. Key developments include:

1. Hybrid AI and Edge Computing Integration: Enterprises are moving AI processing from centralized cloud data centers to endpoint devices like AI-powered PCs that have specialized hardware. This hybrid approach demands virtualization strategies that allocate workloads effectively across cloud, edge, and endpoint, optimizing for latency, security, and cost-efficiency.
2. The Return of Bare Metal Servers: Despite virtualization's dominance, bare metal servers—physical single-tenant servers without a hypervisor layer—are making a comeback. They provide predictable, low-latency access to CPU, RAM, and I/O resources critical for AI, gaming, financial services, and blockchain workloads requiring high performance and custom tuning.
3. Virtual Machines and Containers Coexistence: In many enterprises, VMs and containers operate side-by-side, with solutions like Microsoft Hyper-V supporting container isolation via Hyper-V isolated containers. This synergy enables IT to modernize infrastructure by combining VM security boundaries with container agility, affecting how virtualization memory is allocated and managed across different compute models.
4. Mobile Virtualization Expansion: The growing mobile virtualization market, driven by advanced virtualization-ready chipsets and enterprise BYOD policies, increases complexity in managing memory resources in multi-tenant environments on mobile and edge devices.

Challenges in deep virtualization memory management across industries from these trends include:

• Balancing Resource Allocation and Performance Isolation: Ensuring that virtualized memory resources do not degrade performance due to contention, especially in mixed workloads spanning AI tasks, containers, and VMs.
• Cost Predictability and Control: Avoiding unpredictable costs caused by cloud over-abstracted virtualization layers has brought renewed interest in bare metal for certain use cases.
• Security in Multi-Tenancy: Managing memory isolation in multi-tenant systems like containerized environments to prevent data leakage or cross-tenant interference remains complex.
• Complexity of Hybrid Cloud-Edge Architectures: Allocating memory resources dynamically across cloud, edge, and device layers requires sophisticated orchestration tools to optimize workload placement per latency and security needs.

In summary, IT professionals must navigate a landscape where virtualization memory management involves hybrid architectures, multi-tenant security, and performance tuning at scale, balancing new hardware capabilities with evolving software models like containers and bare metal deployments.

Recently, a partnership between VMWare and Amazon has allowed customers to use VMWare's virtualisation software on virtual server power rented from Amazon AWS, demonstrating the maturity of virtualization technology that companies are pushing to its limits. The article "Virtualised environments accelerate integration" provides additional information on the accelerated integration in virtualised environments, while "The evolution of virtualisation" discusses the evolution of virtualisation and its impact further.

When asked what would happen if there was a need to run more virtual machines, 66% of IT professionals said they would need more memory, and 42% would require more servers. The study, which focused on deep virtualisation memory trends, surveyed IT professionals running 30 or more physical servers from various industries. With a significant amount of memory, the apps are able to work more efficiently. Due to the increasing demand of these virtualisation workloads, businesses often need greater memory density to facilitate unpredictable and challenging workload constraints.

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References: 1. Hybrid AI and Edge Computing Integration 2. The Return of Bare Metal Servers 3. Virtual Machines and Containers Coexistence 4. Mobile Virtualization Expansion

1. The survey results align with the increase in data-and-cloud-computing workloads, as IT professionals have reported a growing need for more memory (66%) and servers (42%) to accommodate the rising number of virtual machines, emphasizing the importance of technology in meeting their demands.
2. In light of the current trends in deep virtualization memory management, technology plays a crucial role in balancing resource allocation, performance isolation, cost predictability, security, and complexity for businesses operating in hybrid cloud-edge architectures, particularly as they strive to meet the demands of big data and other challenging workload constraints.

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