Martin at Blade Watch cuts through a lot of FUD and crazy headlines about the Incredible Shrinking Hardware Market and how virtualization is going to smother all OEMs. In short, Martin’s argument is that virtualization makes server provisioning easy; therefore, we will always need more server hardware. QED. (The fact that we’ll be ordering big multiway monsters tricked out with truckloads of RAM is just gravy for the hardware makers.)
Link: Blade Watch » Virtualization to harm server sales?.
We abstract the hardware – swapping the box doesn’t become part of
the five year plan. In the olden days I had to plug the new server in,
give it a new name, a new ip address/network port, install the
operating system and move the application code to the new server. Now,
I can move my virtual machines around ESX hosts, I can commoditize the
hardware, DL580G2 too slow? Buy a new box, configure it, move the
virtual machines on to it – meaning that I have in essence a VMWare ESX
farm which continues to grow – I’ll keep buying servers accordingly to
accommodate this need. …I’ve written about as have others about how the billing
methods/cross charging needs to be brought in line with the new
technologies – with this in mind, with me as IT buying all the kit,
selling you a virtual server service, it’s my decision when to swap out
the kit, and for support/energy efficiency/hardware maintenance cost
reasons, I’m more likely to refresh the servers more regularly,
particularly if it’s not as difficult as it once used to be.
