Virtualization Makes Hardware More Important

Even though virtualization is a software technology, it has the
effect of making hardware more important. This is because
removing lots of servers and migrating their operating systems
to virtual machines makes the remaining servers that
support all those virtual machines even more important.

Although IT organizations could allow individual servers to go
down in a “one application, one server” environment because
each system failure would inconvenience a single user population,
virtualization is very different. Each server supports
multiple virtual machines and multiple user populations. If a
virtualization host goes down, it may affect many applications
and all of those applications’ users.

The importance of hardware is only going to increase as new,
virtualization-ready hardware comes to market. There are
significant virtualization capabilities being cooked up by
hardware manufacturers, so don’t overlook the role of hardware
in your virtualization infrastructure.

Consequently, as you move forward with virtualization software,
the perhaps unexpected effect is that your hardware
environment becomes more important.