Only mostly.

"x86 virtualisation" does the same sort of thing that user separation provided on, well, almost anything but the first and rather trivial time sharing systems all those many years ago. Or what mainframes offer. Or what chroots or jails or zones or containers or a host of other features found in many systems offer. But hey, now windows can benefit from it too, several decades after the rest figured it out, through (third-party) add-ons. Isn't that nice?

It is indeed of particular import in the "windows" racket because that thing just doesn't do very well as anything but eyecandy. And I'd say not even there, but let's not shed bikes. Other systems fail too even if they do fail far, far less and less eggregiously than this. Personally I would indeed say that if software falls over, as it does, and it takes down the entire system with it, then that system isn't very good at all.

Yet if Trevor can't swap it out for something better --and sysadmins are frequently in this position even if they can do and do know better-- then this virtualisation thing comes in mighty handy for containing the damage while reducing the scap heap of under- and misused-by-the-system hardware a bit. This is Trevor describing what it does for him in his shop; he thinks it's serving him well. More power to him.

Let's not forget that there are other benefits from virtualisation such as the ability for a server to be hosting windows boxes by day but switch to linux images for batch processing outside normal hours etc.

I would disagree. I have one customer who has 2500 virtual desktops deployed at a cost of $623 per desktop. This includes everything, even the 10Gb network ports in the datacenter. That cost on top of the realization of soft cost savings and time to deployment for new applications has massively reduced their overall support costs per desktop.

I'm not saying it's a solution for every problem but it is real and it's getting better every day.

Patching and rebooting

Patching is a centralised operation. It's significantly easier in a virtualised environment because I have one application per operating system. I have to test if that patch on that OS affects that application. I have no weird interactions between all these different applications in to debug. One app per OS. Test and release centrally. That part is easy as pie.

Now, rebooting is again made easier by "one app per OS." Rebooting the OS reboots the infrastructure under ONE application. Just one! I don't tank the whole business with a single reboot, I don't have to schedule reboots around 15 different departments. I call up the people who use that application in question go "hey guys, I need to reboot the server for updates, mind if I do that tonight at 7:00pm?"

I get a yay/nay and move forward.

I can schedule and co-ordinate each application independently of the others, and that is a bloody GODSEND. You see, I work in a business where IT doesn't have the almighty word of God. We don't dictate when computers will be available. We work with the affected business units to ensure the best possible quality of service with the fewest possible interruptions.

That means worrying about things like downtime. It also has to bear in mind the real world, where we have telecommuting workers in the systems 24/7.

I can not even conceive what it would take to coordinate a shutdown of the entire corporate infrastructure at any of the companies I oversee. A miracle perhaps. Or 6 months worth of proactive planning.

Virtualised and containerised environments make patching/rebooting EASIER. Yes there are more widgets to reboot, but you can do it without nearly as much angst or worry.

As to tracking and monitoring and securing a fleet of Windows servers, have you tried combinations of some or all of the following:

Active Directory

Novell Zenworks

Windows Server Update Services

Windows InTune

Microsoft System Center Suite

Nagios

Spiceworks

Puppet

++squillions of others

If managing a fleet of servers - physical, virtual or otherwise - to know "are they up, are they patched, are they infected - is a difficult chore for you, then you are doing it wrong. It's easy to do...and there are programs that let you do it for free.

Managing computers is EASY. Managing people (and budgets) is hard.

Windows worm? Can you not lock the running image from permanent changes so a simple restart brings back the fresh article? Pretty sure you can in VMWare, especially so for VDIs that can all run of one base image.

What?

"hey guys, I need to reboot the server for updates, mind if I do that tonight at 7:00pm?"

A proper BOFH would only ask if he knew the answer was 'No! don't do it! I have a job running and it won't finish until 7:15 so please, please, please wait until after 7:15!!" and only then would a proper BOFH proceed to schedule the reboot at 6:45. Then again in my office the email telling everyone to log off for a reboot usually goes out roughly an hour after everyone has rebooted their own system because the application they use most often hasn't been responding for 40 minutes.

@Eddy Ito

I sense the spirit of Simon in you.

@John Sanders

Both excellent points. Two additional cons to virtualisation are network and memory bandwidth saturation.

@Anonymous Coward

It's about $2500 Canadian, for about $5000 a server. Or about 20 physical servers. I.E. Not that many boxes. Assuming you're talking Windows Server only, and not System Center, Exchange, etc...