http://www.itpro.co.uk/applications/news/184236/gartner-virtualisation-to-rewrite-it-rules.html

Virtualisation is so likely to have the greatest impact on operations and infrastructure, Gartner has today published a special report on its potential to rewrite the rules of IT management, deployment, planning and purchasing.

The latest, software-based consolidation craze will be the highest impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012, according to the technology analyst. It predicts virtualisation will transform how IT is managed, bought, deployed, how companies plan and how they are charged.

“As a result, virtualisation is creating a new wave of competition among infrastructure vendors that will result in considerable market disruption and consolidation over the next few years,” it said.

Phil Dawson, Gartner vice president, distinguished analyst and the report’s author was quick to point out that and virtualisation is not a new concept. Storage has already been virtualised - albeit primarily within the scope of individual vendor architectures - and networking is also virtualised, he said.

But Dawson added: “As both server and PC virtualisation become more pervasive, traditional IT infrastructure orthodoxy is being challenged and is changing the way business works with IT.”

Check out this article, it’s an interesting read. It’s not just the cross chargin, the operations etc that change. Interestingly ownership and support has to change, who owns the virtual machine/ESX server? What constitutes a change to the infrastructure? In a virtual world do we not move to a more fluid type infrastructure? By making the server instance a commodity, does that change how it is supported? Who supports it? It’s something we’ll need to watch and see.