There is a new snake oil on sale and its name is Server Virtualization.
The salespeople at VMWARE and other server virtualization companies are really good at their jobs. Somehow they have convinced companies that virtualized server environments are better than bare metal installations. You must be kidding.
I have two clients that are using server virtualization.
The first is running a large SQL Server installation on a virtualized set of servers at a hosting company. This is a high availability and supposed to be a high performance system. My question is this: How are you ever going to be able to take full advantage of the hardware underlying your system if you have put a virtualization system over the operating system?
At the second client we had 8 batch processing machines. These machines run 24*7 and process file transfers, data transformations, data cleanup, data scoring, etc… At least we did have 8 machines. What we have now is a set of 8 virtualized machines running on one big box… Not too long after the installation of this environment you know what happened? The single box we use crapped out hard. So now we had 8 dead virtual machines. In the old arrangement we had 8 machines reducing the potential footprint for hardware failure. Now we have one big point of failure. How does this sound like a good idea?
Virtualization is a great tool for developers. I feel it is entirely inappropriate for server environments.
Does your company use virtualized servers? Do your clients use virtualized servers? Good idea or bad idea?
crossposted from blog.dashpoint.com