"Virtualization in its current form works well with a lot of second-tier products, but not first tier," Wilson says, after a couple of years' worth of experience with Microsoft Virtual Server software. SQL, Exchange, and high-end, resource-intensive apps pretty much need all the all hardware you can throw at them, he adds. But virtualizing something limits performance.
"You may say this Exchange Server or SQL Server operates optimally, but then you have to spend a lot of money to make it happen with all the overhead," says Chris Snow, a coordinator for IT engineering at St. Joseph's Hospital.
Your main server for virtualization can also lock up, he adds. "So unless you have a round-robin configuration, which gets expensive, all those apps are offline too. So I dont plan on virtualizing any mission-critical apps," Snow says.
Wilson says users might consider virtualizing in a cluster for disaster recovery, but even that adds a layer of complexity. "Products have failover and redundancy anyway, so you might as well get another server in case there's a physical hardware problem," he says.
Guardian's getting along just fine running a couple of proprietary accounting programs and older software platforms in virtualized form. Virtualization works well for a property management app with a Windows 2000 database that was built long before Wilson arrived on the scene. "No one knows how to put that on another device, So we segment it and isolate it on some hardware. If it fails we bring the virtual device over," he maintains.
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