In one of the best Slashdot threads I’ve seen in ages, a number of posters chime in with their personal experiences of virtualization. (Usage hint: Set the general threshold = 5 to filter out the dreck, using Advanced Context Controls.) The rough consensus appears to be:

• Virtualization has overhead, but probably a lot less than the 43-50% sometimes claimed.
• Just to be safe, don’t virtualize apps that are already I/O-bound or otherwise running flat-out. (So there’s no contradiction to my support for dedicated security, networking, and data warehouse appliances.)
• Big enterprises have lots of production servers that are old, unreliable, and/or idle most of the time. Virtualize those.
• If a server’s use is particularly spiky, it may be a great candidate for virtualization.
• Most development servers can and should be virtualized.

Makes sense to me.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 6:00 am and is filed under Computing appliances, Platforms, Virtualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.