Virtualisation has the potential to solve many of the problems plaguing the data centre, VMware chief scientist and co-founder Mendel Rosenblum argued in a keynote at the VMworld 2007 conference in San Francisco.

Virtualisation today is mostly used to consolidate non-mission critical applications, allowing firms to increase the utilisation rate of their hardware.

More advanced features such as VMware's Vmotion or XenSource's XenMotion enable the live migration of workloads between physical servers, allowing firms to pool servers and assign resources as workloads demand.

But the technology is capable of far more, according to Rosenblum. "The virtualisation layer today is just scratching the surface," he told delegates.

"Virtualisation can provide a steady stream of innovations. It is not just a one-time blip. It is a whole new infrastructure."

The technology adds an abstraction layer, referred to as "pixie dust" by Roseblum, that unties the hardware from the operating system and user applications.

This uncoupling allows for new ways to manage hardware, applications and data centres, argued the scientist.

"The challenge is to find really hard problems that can be solved in the virtualisation layer," he said, adding that as the number of applications for virtualisation grows, its adoption will increase.

VMware showed off three research projects demonstrating how virtualisation can be used in new ways.

Instead of moving virtual workloads between servers, Rosenblum demonstrated a research project that allows for storage to be relocated to a different device, regardless of the underlying standard.

Virtualised storage networks typically demand that all devices adhere to the same standard, such as Fibre Channel or iSCSI.

• Videos of Rosenblum's storage, virtual appliance and high availability demonstrations are available on vnunet.com TV