The Virtualization Mentality

Virtualization this past year has boomed.  The VMWare conference, where Microsoft had an amazing presence, had over 10,000 attendees.  10,000!  This is no small feat by any length.  Virtualization is the seen by many as the holy grail of computing for the next few years as it will finally allow people to efficiently consolidate servers and maximize performance, reliability, and availability.

As you begin to explore Virtualization in your environment, understand the that the technology, though ready for primetime, still requires careful IT management policies and managed validation of the hosting environment by trained professionals.  I'd like to share an experience from Keith Combs, Microsoft IT Evangelist, who is as methodical as they come.  Learn from his experience because even though he was dealing with consumer technology, more and more businesses are attempting to rely on commodity technology without understanding the implications during unexpected downtime.

Here is an excerpt.

"After I got done with the primary content, I decided to fire up my Windows Vista virtual machine.  This VM I am referring to runs on my Mac via the VMWare Fusion virtualization product.  One small problem, the VM was pretty hosed after it started running.  Explorer.exe kept crashing.  I could not get Defender updates.  I could not get the VM to survive long enough to pull updates and update itself.  Bad news.  I tinkered with the VM for a while then started to wonder why..." read full article

Enjoy your weekend --VT