Delivering the virtual world

However, Donnelly cautions that this newfound speed has brought with it the risk that management of all such virtual machines may be more complex than protagonists of the technology often let on.

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Shock horror, technology more complex to deploy and operate than the marketing literature implies! I'm sure there are Dilbertesque conversations taking place all over the world about "rolling out this VM thingy over the weekend, thus saving nearly 83% of the current data centre costs"...

Server virtualisation does have some great aspects with deployment, load balancing, disaster recover etc etc. but it takes careful planning and design to make it work - and like all things software it has bugs and foibles to keep things interesting. And when the multi-layered monster system stops working VM adds another layer of complexity to the diagnosis problem...

Oh yes, memo to all companies planning to deploy into a VM environment: Make sure you have a VM development and test environments as well - alternatively, enjoy the time you spend trying to get everything working...