Virtualization Snake Oil?

Rod Paddock over at codebetter.com (and blog.dashpoint.com) has published a blog entry called "Server Virtualization the New Snake Oil" where he claims that server virtualization, specifically naming VMware, is a bad idea. Well, after reading the entry I tend to agree. Not that I think that server virtualization is a bad idea, but the implementation Rod outlines is indeed a very bad idea. Running eight 24x7 production servers on a single piece of hardware, without building any redundancy is indeed a very bad idea. In fact, thats a recipe for disaster. The original post does not indicate whether VMware Server or VMware ESX server were used. Like anything else, especially in the tech world, building solutions without the proper knowhow or competence will lead to problems at some point. If you build the infrastructure right, there is no reason why a virtualized environment would be more error prone than a physical one. As long as you are dealing with production servers, you do need to build redundancy into the infrastructure, regardless of virtualization or not. Server Virtualization is not snake oil, not even close. In my experience, from my own live production environment, server virtualization (with VMware ESX Server/Virtual Infrastructure 3) has resulted in better uptime for our servers, reduced power consumption and better manageability. I guess Rick's comment on the original post sums it up pretty nicely:

The only proper reply to this badly informed rant is: virtualization does not compensate for incompetence.

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel