I may be oversimplifying things, but the concern over the “complexity of virtualization” confuses me. I recently read an article titled “Virtualization dangers and how to avoid them” published at Computerworld by a couple of Avanade guys. The article points out the risks of managing a data center, (the same risks we all know and love) but points to these risks as being heightened by using virtualization to consolidate your datacenter. Virtualization doesn’t add to these concerns. If you have a DC without an SLA, a data recovery plan and operational processes then you have problems with or without virtualization.

I’ve always thought of the virtual machines running in our environment as physical machines from a management and maintenance perspective. We use the same rules of patching, managing, deploying etc… we even use the same tools to do it, MOM and SMS in our case. So when people ask “how much more difficult is it to run virtual machines in production?” I usually reply by saying it’s not more difficult at all, it just takes less space. I imagine this to be abstraction. David is always telling me to “abstract it out” which I assume he means in the developer sense of reducing the details to focus on the manageable pieces one at a time. So to me, fifteen servers in three racks are just the same as 15 virtual machines in three servers. That is oversimplifying but it is a simpler conversation to have rather than starting with all the details and caveats.

The one thing the article does point out is the provisioning puzzle, understanding your hosts and how your guests are going to impact them is an art form and a detail you will want to address eventually but if your considering consolidating start by building a virtual machine and thinking of it as a server, that’s what the rest of us did.

Here’s the Computerworld article: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9005255&pageNumber=1

And another one (in Computerworld) which talks about how data center managers love virtualization:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=112821