Virtualization and data center capacity

Alan Zeichick wrote a great article back in August 2005 that outlined why virtualization technology is so important in today's data center. Data centers are constantly balancing performance with the demands of power and cooling and application reliability. Virtualization enables a number of these challenges to be addressed. In a typical enterprise data center a large range of applications are managed. They each have different profiles. Virtualization enables the Data Center manager to invest in higher performance machines and run multiple tasks in fully isolated Operating System environments. The cost of building a new data center is substantial so any technology that can extend the life of an existing center is worth considering. While it is feasible to run web servers and file server functions on the same machine - just look at the standard Microsoft Small Business Server configuration. Security specialists will advise against this because if you web server is compromised you open up your internal services to the intruder. Virtualization avoids this situation by allowing internal and external functions to be isolated while operating on the same physical equipment. This allows the data center manager to take advantage of differing operational load profiles to make more efficient use servers thereby reducing the power and colling demands in the data center. So join the convesation and drop me a line and tell me how your company is using virtualization technology. What hardware platforms, Operating Systems and services are being delivered this way? What challenges have you faced deploying the technology? Post your comments below.