This is the hot word in the industry, and it's getting hotter and hotter. The first time I saw the VMWare workstation was back to year 2002 when Windows Server 2003 was just released not too long. I was immediately hooked. Even since then, I have been using this new technology constantly but mainly for testing purpose. I wasn't interested too much about using it to consolidate the servers because I wasn't too sure about the performance. All the testing I did before all lead to me that you have to scarify the performance to gain the benefit.
But recently, after performing more tests on server platform, I was really into it now and started considering seriously how to apply this technology to the server level. Michael Otey explained The High Cost of Server Sprawl?and indicated that
In most cases, server virtualization is the best way to implement server consolidation. Virtualization doesn't require specialized hardware, and it lets you run multiple OSs with complete application integrity. Better yet, two of the major virtualization products, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Release 2 and VMware Virtual Server 1.0, are both production ready and completely free.
Besides, one other thing that caught me really is its hardware-independent feature which could be a perfectly alternative solution for the disaster recovery purpose. I have been thinking the disaster recovery strategy for my company for long time and none of the solutions that I thought about or learned before could compare to this hardware-independent technology. Think about how easy it is while bad thing happens to my main server that hosts several of my critical servers. All I need to do is just moving the image files to the different server that has virtual server software loaded and fire them up again. I can bring all critical servers up and running within one hour or two. The down time allowance is totally fine for the size of my company.
The solution seems perfectly to me. But there are also more questions that need to be answered clearly before implementing the whole idea, such as how the backup strategy works with it, and how the switch over works when the disaster happens, etc.
I have created another category called Virtualization in this blog and hopefully will post more about this in the future.