Posted on May 18th, 2009 by Tim Danton

Is the world really going virtual?

According to our sister site Channel Pro the number of virtual machines is set to outnumber their physical counterparts during 2009. There’s a caveat to that: we’re talking servers rather than desktop systems, but it’s still an amazing statistic.

Not that the world’s been caught napping by virtualisation. Unlike most industry buzzwords that come and go with the frequency of someone being mortally offended by someone else’s thoughtless behaviour in The Archers – as an aside, am I the only one who shouts at the radio saying “Why don’t you just talk to them like anybody else in the world would?” – the word virtualisation has been bandied around for years.

And evidently, 2009 is its year. But is it? Clearly in the world of large datacenters and large business it’s having an impact – I can’t argue with the figures, with IDC claiming that 358,000 servers shipped with a virtualisation platform in place in Western Europe during 2008 – but I’m not being inundated by queries from readers of PC Pro asking if their smaller businesses should be looking at virtualisation.

So what I’d like to know is, have you experimented with virtual machines in your business? Indeed, have you taken the plunge? If so, what size is your business? And has it worked? I’d be interested to know any success stories, but I’d also be interested to know what’s stopped you going virtual – if you’ve considered it at all.

Tags: channel pro, datacenters, servers, Virtualisation

Posted in: Hardware, Real World Computing

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7 Responses to “ Is the world really going virtual? ”

Bluespider Says:
May 19th, 2009 at 9:31 am
Seriously? the Archers??!!?? What demographic are you pitching to?

I would have thought a suitably sci fi analogy would have been more appropriate, rather than an antiquated radio transmission documenting the lives of some rural farmers wondering who sho tthe local Badger…

And Radio? whats one of them? surely you would listen to such transmissions on a DAB receiver or at least over the internets on an A listed Squeezebox Duet?

I’m only asking…
Alan Says:
May 19th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Yes, I experimented with virtualisation by migraing 4 physical non business critical servers onto one virtual host server with 4 virtual machine srunning on it.

This was last year and I opted to use Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 basically because I’m very Microsoft trained and was able to set everything up without looking too much at documentation etc

It’s been nothing short of a grand success.
james016 Says:
May 19th, 2009 at 10:06 am
We are using VMWare on a Linux host and it is running brilliantly.
One of the servers was built up from scratch and the other was a physical server converted using VMWare Converter.

We only spent money on the hardware. All the software is free.
Ant Evans Says:
May 19th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Small businesses feel most pain trying to get competent sysadmins or services to keep their systems up and running. Virtualisation just means their Linux/Exchange/cabling guy now has to be a VMWare/VPC/hypervisor/image change control expert as well. This does not ease their pain until those skills become mainstream.

What SMEs need is service, not technology.

PS. I work for a very large org and yes, we are looking at virtualisation, but mainly because we are running out of space. I doubt it will be any cheaper.
John Says:
May 19th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Used VMWare Convertor and Server to snapshot old hardware and replace two ancient servers (running critical software) with VM’s – both have a higher “spec” than the hardware they replaced.
Users can’t tell the difference from their end.
muck Says:
May 20th, 2009 at 9:27 am
running a certain art package via VMWare’s thin app client. Can run the said package directly from a USB stick without installing anything. Amazing technology
Steve Cassidy Says:
May 21st, 2009 at 8:28 am
Ant, if you work for a large organisation, how do you know what small organisations ned or indeed what they get? The reputable cabling guys know full well to stay away from Exchange – or they subcontract someone who knows what they are doing!

I have more clients with VMs deployed, than not. This is a complete reversal of the situation only 18 months ago, though I expect it to slow down in the coming year because there’s a bit of a hardware cartel building up. In 2007 you could virtualise one server onto it’s physical twin: in 2009, the chances are your perfectly decent late-ish 3-ish Ghz Xeon server will be identifed by the hypervisor as “not supporting virutalisation” and you’ll be back to your server vendor. And prices for hypervisor-approved server platforms are phenomenal. £7k is starter money, £15k is middle ground.