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Not to quibble, but there is already a great deal of network infrastructure built into virtualization - I'm running multiple VLANs, firewalls, virtual switches, and a clustered environment under VMWare all within one box. Two boxes. All right, four.

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.