I was reading an article recently about virtualization that actually surprised me. The Collier County School District in Florida is a very big proponent of virtualization technology. Their technology plan calls for the replacement of traditional desktops with thin clients. Users would essentially log into a virtualized desktop located at the District's central computing center. By loading up blade servers with lots of RAM they are trying to get 30 or more desktops per server.
Wow! Thirty virtual machines per physical host! We have not been nearly so aggressive, with our biggest servers handling 15 or 16 virtual machines. Many of our servers are much smaller and we have a correspondingly smaller number of virtual machines. Right now we have in excess of 190 virtual machines, some of these being used as desktops, while others are used as servers, both in a Development capacity and a Production capacity.
With the upcoming release of Windows Server 2008, however, we plan to take even more advantage of virutalization technology. Comments from Microsoft about the software being able to handle 512 virtual machines per physical machine, notwithstanding, we don't plan on hitting that number any time soon. What we do plan on doing is implementing features that will allow virtual machines to consume more CPU on the box on which they are hosted, features that will allow us to move a virtual machine from one server to another with no interruption to service, features that will allow us to create new virtual machines in minutes, in some cases in an automated fashion to handle heavier workloads.
Virtualization is a proven technology, just talk to any mainframe guy and he can tell you that multiple "operating systems" are run an IBM mainframe every day. Great strides are being made in this area everyday and when they are ready to use we will be there.
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