Secondly while I agree with most of your points, I don’t agree necessarily that the sudden urge to splurge on virtual machines is a bad thing. On the contrary. In my experience business tend to consolidate multiple server roles into a single server to save on the need to buy physical hardware. With the growth in virtualization platforms I see more purpose built servers in the data centre and even in the small business.

@Mark, @Greg – virtualization is reaching the end of the hype cycle, but there is still a lot of noise in data center environments where disaster recovery and high availability are big issues.

Note a SAN (or NAS) is required when you want to be able to move a running VM onto other hardware. Some of the “bare metal” VM tools are also designed to work better with a SAN – the idea being that the VM software can be stored in flash memory and the hardware does not need any physical disks.

Then there is sprawl, people forget that a VM is another host I have to manage.

Then theres that nonsense about ‘the server is only 5% utilised’. Rubbish. Recalculate that for SLA’d hours.

>> It doesn’t matter whether they are physical or virtual servers because the work will still need to be done. If you double the number of servers, you need to double the number of people looking after them.

Disagree.. it’s obvious that the elements of the infrastructure that require the most configuration and TLC, the applications and services, will require rougly the same amount of work however many machines they happen to be distributed over – the only difference is maintaining more base OSes, which, at least in Windows’ case, pretty much take care of themselves with WSUS – I’m not familiar enough with *nix to know if they’re the same, but I assume they have a similar facility. The extra work that might be required, of course, is negated by the roll-out times of the new servers and driver/hardware issues. Configure once, deploy many times, all on exactly the same virtualised hardware layer.

With MS aggressively targetting the VM space with Hyper-V and replicating more of VMWare’s crowned jewels for free and making it easier to use and more accessible (eg. no requirements for SANs, as it’ll on with any hardware with a win2k8 driver), there’s going to be a point at which it doesn’t make sense to use at least some VMs, even if it’s only for stuff like backups and disaster recovery.

@Mark I also work in a dev-house, and VMs have long been a favourite of developers – and it doesn’t take long for a sysadmin to fall in love with virtualised infrastructures, it makes their life SO much easier.

>But if we follow the hype, there will be much pain ahead. Sometimes choice can be a terrible thing.

Virtualisation has moved beyond the hype stage, it’s a natural progression in the IT workd especially with memory becoming cheaper, CPUs having more and more cores on them and of course the big green movement happening. I think if a company hasn’t at least investigated virtualisation and understands how it will benefit/hinder them, someone needs a rap on the knuckles!

I also don’t really buy that there’s a lot of FUD out there about VMs – yes, there’a ton of info pushed out, but it’s at least useful to someone, somwehere. Unless you advertise your product as “This virtualisation platform virtualises machines”, you’re going to start telling SOMEONE about features they won’t need. Pick out the points you need, and ignore the rest. If you can’t decide which bits you need, then you shouldn’t be making the decision anyway.

Nice article, but I have key areas where virtualisation has huge benefits, you dont always have to believe the hype, just implement it where practical!

Lets give a relatively simple scenario for a Software development company.

Software dev companies typically run multiple projects at once. Projects start and stop all at various times. A software co can use virtualistion on hardware without a fancy SAN (read storage area network – a lot of hard drives in one place) – forget about the fancy bells and whistles of ‘live migration’ from one phyiscal machine to another.

The real bonus is the company can instantly create an environment similar to what the customer will have instead of buying expensive new hardware. These Virtual Machines (VM’s) will run for the course of the project, once done, they can be turned off and the processing power freed up for another project. You can even ‘ship’ via the net or via harddrive the entire VM to the customer!

You can even have prebuilt software in the VM and copy it so the next project that uses the same software is already installed – quite nifty.

Whilst there is a lot of FUD about virtualisation, there are huge benefits for even smaller companies.

We are seeing big savings in our datacentre already with our own and customers infrastructure. We can deliver an equivalent piece of hardware for a fraction of the cost, reducing power consumption dramatically, centralising storage onto our SAN and giving customers access to storage that can grow on demand.

There are more advantages but virtualisation allows companies to significantly reduce their costs. Xen & VMWare both have free offerings for the entry level.

I’ve just finished reading some brochures. Took me a while to realise they where talking thin clients in clusters. Didn’t help that they’d renamed their product or that they invented some new terms for old and trusted concepts.

I’m not sure if there main aim is to make me feel like a moron left behind in the dust of some new developments and then they trade on my ignorance to just buy their stuff to stop my embarrassment. Or do they think if they add enough buzzwords I might think they’re even cooler then the next guy. Or maybe its just too scary to tell it like it is since then I could more easily compare their offering to others.

Who knows, maybe there is a special tax rebate for companies in silicon valley when they use more then 5 3 letter acronyms for their products.