Ah, there's nothing like a recession to kick IT industry trends into a higher gear - and get those IT analysts out there preaching change and cost cutting. Today, it was Forrester Research's turn to talk up virtualization on servers and PCs as well as cloud computing as part of its sales pitch for two new reports it has put …

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Thursday 5th March 2009 05:14 GMT unitron

Less than one dollar per participant?

Am I understanding this correctly?

"...2,600 IT managers and other decision makers..."

"...studies costing two grand a pop..."

So that's 2000 divided by 2600?

They Bulk-Mailed return postage paid post cards with a few multiple choice machine readable checkboxes, maybe?

(mine's the one with spare change in one pocket and a roll of stamps in the other)

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Thursday 5th March 2009 05:14 GMT Mike Laverick

Large workloads

But virtualizing the kind of mission-critical applications that tend to run on bigger boxes (application servers, database servers, and such) is much more problematic.

This keeps on being repeated by the register as QED fashion.... Have you not read case studies that show oracle, sap, exchange all run perfectly acceptable in a virtualization platforms...?

Of course the is the 1% of really high-end stuff such as 8-ways with 256GB of RAM... but they are in a very small minority - and this hardware is now regarded as low-spec compared to 16-way box built for virtualization.

Please stop using the word "fake servers". Virtual Machine are no less real than a physical server. It's just irratating. VMs are no less real to the end users who get their email and desktops from them every day...

Mike Laverick

RTFM Education

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk

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Thursday 5th March 2009 10:06 GMT kevin king

testing the figures

I have to say that looking at the figures they might seem big but they are true for us as a SMB...we've monkey'd around with Virtualization and now going to take the plunge and remove a number of legacy plus web systems to VM. About 33% of our servers will be VM by the end of the month, not just to save cost but space and get over the dying hardware on older boxes therefore keeping maintenance down and freeing up our valuable rack space needed to expand.

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Thursday 5th March 2009 10:06 GMT Hironaka

Re: Large workloads

@Mike Laverick

Have you not read case studies that show oracle, sap, exchange all run perfectly acceptable in a virtualization platforms...?

Agreed. I fail to see why a database or application wouldn't run in a VM while a webserver would. From my limited experience with virtualization, as long as you don't squeeze the amount of allocated RAM, anything will run perfectly fine.

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Thursday 5th March 2009 10:06 GMT mh.

PR Reviewed Research

Has anyone done any studies of how accurate these surveys are? It might be interesting to dig out a Gartner or Forrester report from 5 years ago and see if what they predicted actually happened. Suggesting things that might happen is easy, and the analysts seem to be getting into more mainstream media, but it's a bit of a waste of time if what they predict consistently fails to happen.

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Thursday 5th March 2009 10:06 GMT Anonymous Coward

Forrester

This would be the same Forrester that doesn't know the difference between Google and Phorm.

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Thursday 5th March 2009 12:26 GMT Chris Miller

Desktop virtualization?

I'm guessing that this means thin clients, i.e. Citrix (other solutions are available :). I can't see any reasons why general purpose desktops would need to run multiple OS instances under a true VM (and it certainly wouldn't reduce costs).

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Thursday 5th March 2009 14:15 GMT Matt Bryant

Separating the wheat/SMS from the chaff/WAP

Fun pub game for admins - convince your mates why you think product/technology X is going to be the next SMS or the next WAP. So far, general (partialy-inebriated) consensus is cloud still looks like WAP, but virtualisation has already become the SMS of the server world. Current fave topics for such team-meetings-cum-booze-ups are FCOE (Son of iSCSI?), SSDs (nice but f*ck-a-duck price), and VDI (the rehash of the rehash of the remake of terminals). All debaters welcome, but you get an automatic three-rounds-at-the-bar penalty if you bring a Powerpoint pres!

/the public house is calling!

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Thursday 5th March 2009 14:15 GMT Anonymous Coward

@ Mike Laverick

"... Of course the is the 1% of really high-end stuff such as 8-ways with 256GB of RAM... but they are in a very small minority - and this hardware is now regarded as low-spec compared to 16-way box built for virtualization. ..."

Mike, hopefully you're talking about 4-way servers with quad CPU per sockets and not 16 socket servers. The former is the order of the day and with 2-ways, optimal for virtual workloads due to efficient memory scaling (amount of memory and bus bandwidth).

The latter just don't add up from a price-performance perspective, don't scale due to bus limitations and are inflexible for many topologies and workloads.

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