Just noticed this from CIO Magazine. Nice survey, shows how mainstreamed virtualization is and where people are seeing value and places to watch out. Link: Virtualization in the Enterprise Survey: Your Virtualized State in 2008.

Happy Days Are Here Again

Few ROI calculations please 85 percent of CIOs. The ROI on
server virtualization does, even though you’re struggling to
measure it precisely. Today, virtualization helps many CIOs
reduce costs on a massive scale while improving flexibility to
the business. That’s been the experience of Credit Suisse CIO
Tom Sanzone, whose efforts we profiled earlier this year. CIOs in
enterprises large and small tell the same story: It is easy
to wow the business side with the returns. No wonder you’re
smiling.

Virtualized Servers: You Love the ROI

Very satisfied	37%
Satisfied	48%
Not very satisfied	6%
Not at all satisfied	2%
Not sure	8%

Reasons to Virtualize Servers

Cut costs via server consolidation	81%
Improve disaster recovery and backup plans	63%
Provision computing resources to end users more quickly	55%
Offer more flexibility to the business	53%
Provide competitive advantage	13%

Hyper-V is "roughly analogous VMware Server 1.0, although not as polished" says Paul Venezia in InfoWorld. Ouch.

Link: Next-gen virtualization from Microsoft | InfoWorld | Review | 2007-12-19.

From what I’ve seen, Microsoft’s Hyper-V is
roughly analogous to VMware Server 1.0, although not as polished. It
doesn’t appear to be a significant challenge to VMware’s Virtual
Infrastructure and ESX Server products, and given the fact that VMware
Server is free, runs on Linux and Windows, and is considerably more
mature, it’s questionable how many infrastructures will benefit from
using Hyper-V over VMware Server.

Make sure you read that right — Paul is comparing Hyper-V, not to our enterprise platform VI3, but to the last version of the free VMware Server, and even then he thinks it comes out behind.  Hyper-V is not even in the same league as VMware Infrastructure, not ready to roll out in the enterprise, and it’s questionable if it has value at all. Again, ouch.

After my brief look at the beta release, I can
confirm that this is truly beta, and it has a long way to go to be
production-ready.

Look, it’s a beta, and betas can be rough, so let’s not start feeling too superior. Hyper-V will be better when it’s released, and it will get better over time. But Microsoft needs to deliver its best effort here on to make this enterprise-ready infrastructure software that your whole data center will depend on. In the hubbub and hype and wishful thinking even before the product is released, people have forgotten that Hyper-V will be first generation software. It will be real world software with real-world issues; already it has been delayed and critical features (Live Migration = VMotion) have been dropped. VMware Infrastructure is a full virtualization platform, trusted at over 40,000 customers, production-ready, and not standing still.

Heck, even if you want to start out with free, then go with the more mature VMware Server — although Paul compared Hyper-V to version 1.0, version 2.0 is now in beta. But there’s no need to wait for Godot, Microsoft, or Superman to save us. The ROI is clear right now. Go forth and virtualize.

–John Troyer

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.