Comments on: Is the world really going virtual?

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:28:58 +0000

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.

By: muck

muck — Wed, 20 May 2009 09:27:47 +0000

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

By: John

John — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:01:45 +0000

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.

By: Ant Evans

Ant Evans — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:51:16 +0000

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.

By: james016

james016 — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:06:20 +0000

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.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 19 May 2009 09:39:50 +0000

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.

By: Bluespider

Bluespider — Tue, 19 May 2009 09:31:07 +0000

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…