Why Data Center Virtualization Doesn’t Cut It at the Edge

Can’t I just use my same data center virtualization software at the edge? Zededa founder and CEO Said Ouissal says he hears this question a lot. The answer, he says, is a hard “no.”As enterprises increasingly adopt edge computing, they want the same virtualization benefits that they are used to in their data centers — and have come to expect from the cloud. It presents a massive opportunity, and because of this many vendors like VMware and Cisco that offer virtualization technology are also moving into edge computing and IoT. But according to Ouissal, virtualization at the edge requires more than simply running the same data center software on edge and IoT devices. One of the big reasons for this is that edge compute devices are leaner than data center servers, which means virtualization software can’t eat up too many resources.