[et-mgmt-tools] Xen 'production' services - are we there yet?

[Tom Georgoulias]

Aaron Lippold wrote:
> What's the one line ROI then to the
> management in your opinion?

IMO the one line ROI is "The jury is still out."

There are definite pros/cons with virtualization and whether or not it 
saves you money and/or improves your system platform really depends on 
what you are doing now, how you implement virtualization, and what the 
expectations are.

You certainly need beefier servers (more RAM, CPUs, etc.) if you plan to 
run multiple VMs, and since you are probably going to be asked to use 
fewer servers then the servers you do use will need to be pretty 
robust/dependable.  That costs money.  Also, taking one physical server 
offline actually takes multiple virtual servers offline, which means you 
need either flexibility in scheduling maintenance outages (or patience 
from users when you have system crashes) or rely upon the migration 
capabilities of VMs.  If migrations are the answer, then the storage 
component is really critical because you need some shared storage 
technology (like SAN) that all of your physical servers have access to.

All of this stuff takes planning and consideration, and getting the 
design right is important.

Tom