If a new CS college graduate asked you a question about a potential career, would you recommend work in the field of virtualization?
5 replies (most recent on top)
Automation is key now so if you can develop scripting skills and orchestration, knowing virtualization and being able to migrate workloads from on-prem to public cloud is a good niche right now.
I’ve been working with Citrix and virtualization since the early 2000’s. Virtualization itself has become more or less commoditized - it will still have its place in modern datacenters for as long as companies keep using datacenters (or even VMC in AWS,Azure,GCP), so there’s that. Clustering and hyperconverged infra will have its place for a while as well. It’s going to really be more of a skill set or skill area to learn than it’s own career going forward. You’d be best off also learning cloud (hybrid would be relevant) containerization/orchestration (K8s, Docker) concepts, etc.
Coming from someone that spent over a decade at Citrix and 20+ years in this industry, I would say it is not a great choice.
VDI and Virtualizing Windows Apps only serves a purpose as an enabler to legacy technology. Most companies are moving towards native Cloud apps which really makes VDI unnecessary.
Stick with learning cloud and cloud native technologies.
Citrix is a dinosaur so it’s just a latest of time till it goes extinct.
I didn’t know that would be a career of its own… I would recommend learning a broader range of skills and also being nimble to learn new things. Otherwise it’s easy to become obsolete… See VDI.
It's growing. Some reading material:
https://www.datamation.com/careers/virtualization-careers/