Those who remember back to the switch from mainframe to client server will recognise another paradigm shift, but there are some drawbacks. Much more technically adept colleagues tell me virtual machines are easy to set up and deploy but gauging performance is much trickier. And even though assets are now sweated harder, performance is degraded as resources are no longer dedicated.

No problem really – just buy more powerful hardware. But if you’re trying to rein in costs, a server upgrade programme is the last thing you really want to do. Ironically, most large virtualisation projects coincide with a server upgrade anyway, so parts of the savings are absorbed by capital investment.

Training is another area of concern; the skill set for designing, deploying and managing virtualised environments is still relatively new. There are no industry standards for the management processes of a virtualised environment and there will be issues as different individuals or teams fumble their way through designing a virtual policy within each environment.

Lastly, there is fear. At a basic level, few IT professionals want to work themselves out of a job. The magic bullet that is virtualisation often reduces the complexity of managing infrastructure. Rows of telex operators or switchboard staff were made obsolete very quickly by modern data input systems and IVR, and although not as extreme, virtualisation could potentially reduce the need for a distinct layer of IT staff.

OK, I’m mostly playing devil’s advocate here, as the rise of virtualisation is unstoppable – it provides too many benefits. However, the IT industry needs to arm itself with a counter to the potential issues it brings, both technical and cultural, to ensure the smoothest of sales.

The company wanted you to hear about its pre-virtualisation check, done entirely remotely. It wanted to pass on the news about its new smaller business servers – T400 and T710 – which are decently configured for VMware and Hyper-V, and made a point of mentioning its next-generation remote management card, which will update drivers and patches for you as they are announced.

I’m writing this at some speed, just after the end of its embargo period, though to be perfectly honest I couldn’t see any Big Secrets being let out of the bag. When I asked the questions that PC Pro is getting a bit of a reputation for, about how Dell’s remote access services would be legally defined to protect the client’s data and help to disclose exactly where the team of consultants furtling round your servers, are based… then I got a few simple, honest ‘don’t knows’.

But the gaps in the consulting delivery fell rather by the wayside when they started casually mentioning that these new servers are eleventh generation. For Spinal Tap fans, this is a magic number: we are dealing with Eleventh Generation servers. Just the kind of throwaway number guaranteed to impress in the boardroom!

I actually think Dell has had a bit of a wake-up moment – a rueful off-guard comment was made to the effect that [as a hardware vendor] “we have given up trying to persuade our customers not to virtualise their servers”, and the two new servers fill a gap in the market I’ve been watching develop for the past two quarters, wherein all the little cheap servers have vanished and the multicore monsters have come in at £10,000-£20,000… so perhaps the Eleventh Generation isn’t as much of a cheap shot as I had thought.

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.

Has VMWare turned the tables on the competitors? Has it pulled off the great magic trick of pulling the tablecloth off the table while leaving the champagne glasses not only upright but still full of bubbly?

 Yes, I think so. Tonight, Contributing Editor Cassidy and I are having dinner with the senior Microsoft virtualisation people. And we will be reporting back tomorrow on their response to today’s announcements.

 But the move of VMWare to let anyone set up a cloud-computing infrastructure, to allow for SLAs and metrics in the delivery process, to let a customer have an internal business cloud or use a range of external cloud vendors (and cheefully move loads between them at will) has driven a hatchet through the lock-in plans of the existing players: Microsoft, Amazon, Google.

 VMWare’s CEO, Paul Maritz, used the analogy of the famous song from The Eagles – Hotel California – with a slight misuse of the line: ”You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”.

His point with regard to something such as Microsoft’s Azure, is that you need to change your app to run it on the cloud. And once you are in, will you ever be able to move to a different vendor?

 The enabling of an app-hosting virtualisation cloud ecosystem is a masterstroke, and immediately lifts the game to an entirely new level. 

Maritz knows all about software lock-in: he was senior vice president of Microsoft, running the entire Windows platform group, for most of the 1990s. Today he espouses an open interface, non-lock-in model using standards based interfaces.

 If VMWare can really deliver this during 2009, at least in first-release versions across the board, then there is no question that VMWare is changing the rules. Anyone, including myself, who thought that Microsoft had turned the tables on VMWare with its HyperV strategy, has been shown to be taking a short-term view. VMWare has laid out a long-term strategy which is extraordinarily enticing.

Read my latest missives from VMWorld in Cannes on my Twitter feed. 

The question in my mind is; was VMWare surfing a wave during the pre-recession years, or actually driving it? Will the uber-boffins who delivered the goods, keep doing so without their Den Mother?