http://blogs.zdnet.com/virtualization/?p=245
When I’ve had a chance to speak with executives of suppliers of virtual machine software, they often point out that one of the major benefits of deploying application environments inside of virtual machines is simplicity. That is, they suggest that using virtual machine software reduces complexity in the environment.
While that might be true from the perspective of that single application, it may not be true of the whole environment. Installation, migration from one physical machine to another and even some application management tasks can be facilitated by the use of virtual machine technology.
Installation may change from an arduous task to merely copying a file. Migration of an application environment from one physical system to another also become a file transfer.
Check out this interesting article. Does virtualization reduce the complexity of the infrastructure? Well not always, but then in some cases there are only so many changes to the infrastructure, not to mention the billing and the way we do business that can be achieved without examining the actual business, the business model.
Virtualization as with any technical (or non-technical) solution will only work as well as your teams, and your business can implement and adopt to it. If you’re billing model isn’t set up in the right way I might have more virtual machines but have the ESX hosts tied to a department or an application team, making management more complex, but equally I might find that the way I can roll back changes, or allocate more disk, more cpu or more memory to a session without going through the normal evaluation, project initiation and sign off stages, by just rebooting my virtual machine could be a real enabler. Work out how your business works with your IT, what the show stoppers are, and implement a virtualization platform which can either work around these constraints, the goal is not to make things less complex, the goal is to make provisioning, support and the lifecycle maybe not easier, but more manageable, more aligned to the business need.
