... & I though they just did the (pricey) in house catering for BT!

Mines the one with the sandwich in the pocket, it's all I could afford!

Virtualization is overrated . There's a reason it's not being heavily used, because it's not as reliable as tried & true hardware. VM is great for backups and as tertiary failovers (after a hardware failover has failed), but should not be used to replace hardware.

Virtualisation is way overrated. And often costs significantly more than discrete hardware with a decrease in reliability.

Take my environment for example.

I work for a (non-UK) government department.

Our Sun servers are outsourced.

Our maintenance costs for a T5220 is something like 3k/month for the server, plus 2k/month for each solaris zone (virtual server). Therefore for a piece of kit with 3 VMs on it costs 9k/month, which is made up of 3k/month for the 'global zone' (the administration zone that only our outsourcers have access to) plus 2k/month for each of the VMs.

Previous to using VMs, it cost a flat 3k/month for each server. Therefore having 3 physical servers cost 9k/month.

Now of course, if we have physical hardware failure we have lost 3 zones, what was once 3 physical servers, for the same cost.

Whie you might say that there is more flexibility, in that there is the ability to assign unused resources from one zone to another, while in theory there is, it costs $$ to get the resources assigned. First, someone has to prove we need resources moved from zone A to zone B (say 20 man-hours), then they've got to convince their management to send a request to the outsourcer to move the resources. Then it's got to go through change control (another 5-10 man-hours of various people's time), then the outsourcer, 4 weeks later, charges 4k+ to type a few commands on the command line to move the resources...

From an administrators point of view, manageing 10 VMs is exactly the same as managing 10 physical servers that aren't VMed. It still takes the same amount of time to ssh to a VM, check logs/restart an app server/truss processes/configure something/deploy something as it does to ssh to a physical server. I can definitely tell you that labour costs of system admins managing a server, whether it is physical or virtual, are far greater than labour costs in asset management or data centre costs. And with the virtualisatoin hype, management (on advice of the outsourcers of course) are going to create shedloads of VMs, costing more $$$ than having a few physical servers.

Using VMs also increases complexity and other maintenance costs. Does this new patch work in a VM? Do we have to keep VMs patched? How much does it cost to verify the software/patch that works fine on a bare-metal server also works within a VM on the same hardware?

What about tracking down problems? What is the real physical interface traffic is coming into/out of because in the VM we only have visibility to the virtual interface? How does it complicate our routing tables on the server to ensure that data leaving VM A has a source IP address of A while traffic leaving VM B has source of B, rather than each one randomly picking a physical interface to transmit out from?

Virtualisation just increases costs and decreases reliability.

If it were not for BOFH and the PFY dumping some of the older unwanted but perfectly serviceable hardware into a 'recycling' skip on occasion we would be short of at least one server, two monitors, a scanner /printer /fax combo... you get the picture

@Joey: "Virtualization is overrated..." Erm, maybe I've missed the relevant Powerpoint but I don't remember any VM vendor saying that their VM software makes the underlying hardware more reliable - that's a snake oil claim that no-one would believe. What VM's _DO_ let you do is make more/better use of that expensive hardware that you're spending your IT buck on. Although I did just come off of a project where the VM solution was used to provide extra fault tolerance (where the logical resources being provided to the client VM's were actually multipathed at a lower level - the fact these logical resources were shared made it cost-effective to provide failover resource).

Consolidation is where VM's are "at" - and this means less expensive hardware out there or, better still, spend the same amount to get "better" hardware - and this 'better' kit usually comes with a shedload more Reliability-Availability-Servicability (RAS) features than the lower kit.

There are some good docs available on this from IBM (Redbooks and the System p sites) - definitely worth a read if you want to see how good a hardware assisted VM environment can be.

Small disclaimer - I don't actually work for IBM (actually one of their competitors) before someone out there accuses me of 'tech pimping'. ;)

Meanwhile to the main part of the report - would think businesses are buying a lot of kit because the vendors are currently trying to punt it out at 'fire sale' type prices - it'd be foolish not to take advantage...

But at least in the enviroment I look after it delivers a lot less

We had a change of management a couple of years ago, this new guy came in and installed a SAN and VMware ESX to our environment

Every server was moved to the new platform consisting of 3 quad core dell 6850s.

Everything slowed down exponentially compared to previous infrastructure, especially SQL, and before anyone says it I know that this scenario was confirmed by the reseller as 'ideal' and we fell for it.

I am now in the process of moving the core infrastructure back to physical servers (at least our 2 SQL servers and exchange) as the performance hit is too high.

The onlly thing our setup does do is simplify backups.

Overall a nice idea but on i386 platorms doesnt seem to be workable

Seems to me your biggest gripe is with the outsourcing and that is not a surprise at all

Paris? She only "outsources" when she needs to