Just trying to understand virtualization....since my processors have the feature,....and I have experience with the 360 OS VM/370.
Architects design - - or in this case, re-design.
It's marvelous stuff but it's getting a little spooky. The ability to bring up entire servers at need and distribute the computational load based on demand means that the administrator needs considerable help in understanding the configuration of the environment from moment to moment. Used to be a feller could bring up a box to serve files and put his hand on it and say "Here's yer file server, boss." No longer. Depending on how geographically spread his virtual environment is that box might be here or in the garage or in Albuquerque, on or off, consuming resources he doesn't even know about until after the fact. If he wants to, say, patch it, he's gotta find it first. Or not.
Exhilarating, actually, but these new tricks are hurting this old dog's head. I'm beginning to suspect this computer stuff might not just be a passing fad after all. BTT for an interesting article, and thanks for posting it.
If nothing else it is worthwhile to pursue because it releases you from the tyranny of being tied to hardware. The benefits you'll get when you consider disaster recovery can be astounding, as you no longer have to worry about attempting to restore data to exactlythe same hardware setup. Some folks find it hard to wrap your head around the fact that when you virtualize a machine, it is no longer a 'box'. Instead, it's now just a directory on a disk with files in it. I had to beat my head against the wall about that recently to a very dense fellow who kept insisting I needed to install an operating system into a container I was doing a raw P2V on.
We've been jumping into virtualization at my company for the past year or so with both feet, and it looks like it will save the company a pretty penny. We're seeing 40+ server consolodation on many of the windows servers. Much less so on the Unix side of things though because in general our Unix boxes have always utilized their hardware better.
It's funny, but in our shop, we're hearing raves from management about how much money is being saved by the massive consolodation we're seeing on the windows side of the house. What never seems to be brought up is the fact that it is quite apparent that those same folks have been massively under-utilizing their resources for years, and thus costing the company millions of dollars every single year because they either didn't know how to size machines, or were apparently incapable of running more than a single application on a machine.
OTOH, we're seeing 5-to-1 (at best) consolodation on our unix hosts because we were already running many apps on the same box. Whereas we might have a couple of IIS servers running on a single server, all of our apache servers had 50+ webservers running on them. Do we get any recognition of that? Quite the opposite. Upper management wants to know why when we virutalize a box, that it takes so much more in resources. It is quite frustrating.