Virtualization to harm server sales?

I read quite a few articles talking about how virtualization is set to harm server sales, I’m not going to highlight any particular articles out there, it’s not fair. Let me summarize my opinions on this in the next three minutes in brief:

Virtualization makes server provisioning easier – before to get a server for Mike in Fixed Income a server required me to get budget, sign off, data center space, a guy to build it, a network cable, some storage and then configure it. – With virtualization, it can be a ghosted/scripted deployment, a web based/help desk based request, Mike in Fixed Income wants a server, Mike logs a call, his line manager agrees the ‘rental cost of the instance’, the virtual machine is cut, imaged and powered on ready for use. For that reason the barriers to increasing the server estate are reduced, meaning in the long term we’ll need more physical servers.

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.

The ESX platform still needs evolved – a DL580G2 might have been great for virtualization a year or two ago, but with the costs of servers falling, keeping that server for 3 years doesn’t quite give me the same benefit – it might be £6,000 to upgrade to 332GB RAM, or £9,000 for a new server from Dell/HP/IBM.

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.

We’ll see, it’s one of those things that’s going to be discussed for the future, what happens in the future is certainly going to be interesting, as old markets close, old opportunities cease, new ones open up, it’s the cost of doing business.

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