More on Virtualization

Some of my team and I went to the "big city" today to meet with a vendor and further our discussion of how we might take advantage of all the benefits that server virtualization has to to offer. It was a good meeting and I got the real sense the vendor was working in our best interest. They did a lot right from a sales process perspective. But, the really cool thing was how they took a look at our environment earlier in the week through a short, on-site engagement and presented those finding to us today, indicating that 33 of our 40 servers are good candidates for virtualization. Wow! What the hell would we do with 33 "empty" servers when we're done virtualizing them? Seriously though, I would be happy with half of those results.

Server virtualization is going to be our flagship project for next year. It has so many benefits. The biggest one for us has to be server consolidation because of the power and space problems we're starting to bump up against. But, the benefits don't stop there. We can talk about HVAC issues, DR advantages, and quicker time to provision new systems. There's probably more but hey, do I really need to go on? I'm excited to get moving on this.