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Stuart Henderson asked:
how does one increase efficiency and reduce IT costs by making things
more complicated?
And Marc Balmer adds:
And, quite obviously, reduce stability and after all security.
Apologies if this is wandering too far off topic.
The opposition to virtualization technology in some quarters here is
curious, though understandable and perhaps laudable among developers and
users of an environment for which stability is paramount. I won't go as
far as to say some of you live under a rock, but I will call it
curious. :)
An informed enterprise sysadmin would probably agree that simplicity,
security, and stability are factors, not goals in themselves, in a
business decision. They are simply costs to be accounted for. On a
large scale, virtual environments have quite compelling advantages in
flexibility, resource utilization, and disaster recovery/business
resumption, not to mention datacenter overhead cost. These all boil
down to dollars/pounds/euros/yen, sometimes lots of them.
For hobbyists, of course, a virtual desktop means risk-free
experimentation with other environments, which should makes us all happy
and might introduce <insert favorite OS here> to a broader audience.
Whereas VMWare was the only game in town for awhile on x86, the
proliferation of virtualization support in x86 hardware has brought a
whole new world of options and possibilities to home users on a budget.
In either case, if a virtual environment is the best or only way to
attain a desired result within a given budget, then choosing the most
robust guest environment to run within it should also be laudable.
OpenBSD can certainly be a compelling choice, though it can be
convincingly argued that its unique strengths might be diluted somewhat
in that environment.
It is a certainty that virtualization is not only here to stay, but will
become increasingly prevalent.
- --
David Talkington
[email protected]
- --
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