During a presentation a couple of weeks ago at the XChange conference in Dallas, I asked several dozen solution providers for a show of hands on this question: How many of you still have customers running servers with 8 GB or less of memory? Just about everyone raised a hand.
With the industry marching toward virtualized-everything IT departments, surely those low-end servers are going the way of OS/2 Warp, floppy disks and other quaint bits of tech nostalgia, I thought.
I was wrong.
 | EDWARD F. MOLTZEN | |
| Can be reached via e-mail at emoltzen@everythingchannel.com. | ||
On "Shirley," one of the Test Center's test servers, the system runs a single AMD Opteron processor with 8 GB of RAM. Windows Server 2008 loads just fine on Shirley, and Hyper V enables well, too. But the server is just incapable of running more than two Hyper V virtual machines at the same time because of the memory ceiling.
When it comes to virtualization, start the conversation by reminding everyone in advance of the Vista trap. Microsoft says Vista can run on PCs with 1 GB of memory. But, really, to get the most out of Vista, 3 GB—preferably 4 GB—of memory will be needed to get the job done.
Unfortunately, many software executives aren't making hardware needs clear when they talk about virtualization. During one Microsoft executive's recent presentation to solution providers on the benefits of Hyper V, only one, fleeting remark was made about the benefits to customers embarking on a "hardware upgrade" of the data center. Not providing clear messaging about the hardware requirements (Hyper V is also a 64-bit-only technology) will only lead to problems.
Putting hardware costs on the table at the outset will give everybody a realistic expectation of the up-front costs of virtualization and the true ROI of a project. The industry has gone through hardware upgrade issues before as other technologies have been introduced, but never quite to this extent. Before you dismiss this warning on virtualization, think back 18 months to the first few times you tried upgrading desktops to Vista.
Do you have a new take on tech?
E-mail the Test Center's Managing Editor at emoltzen@everythingchannel.com.
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