Virtualisation's dirty little secret

By David M Williams
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 04:06

Market

You've heard the sales pitch, you've read the case studies, you're interested in virtualising your data centre. You know you can consolidate servers. You know you can reduce your carbon footprint. Yet, here's something the vendors won’t tell you until you're hooked.

There are plenty of good reasons why you should consider virtualisation.

It can save your energy costs. It can help keep legacy systems running without the need to maintain physical servers or find space.

Possibly best of all from an administration point of view, virtualised servers can be backed up, have software loaded or removed, and be rolled back in a snap if the modifications aren’t successful or desirable.

If a physical server fails a virtual server can be up and running in moments, exactly as it was, on a totally different underlying machine no matter what the base hardware is and no matter what the underlying operating system i.

Yet, there is something you won’t find out about virtualisation unless you dig deep.

What would you think is the best machine to run your virtual server platform on? A quad-core dual-processor HP ProLiant or a single CPU no-name server?

The truth is when it comes to CPU it probably doesn’t matter.

Let me tell you why.