Surviving the virtual machine buzz.

As far as virtual machines, I wish all my servers were virtual and controlled by dynamic provisioning software. I also wish all remote access was only from virtual images run in VMware Player.

I once had a job at an east coast blade server company (populated by a few unsavory sales people). The good thing about the technology was each PC server was half a motherboard, the I/O section was separated off as a pair of PCs that handled disk and network I/O. This way a server image (stored on SAN) could boot on any dual or quad processor PC, and if the server was a member of a farm, the controller software could boot additional PCs for that application and shutdown PCs for a less loaded application. With virtualization that's no longer a remarkable feat, since an image no longer requires specific hardware drivers. Provisioning software (such as from Opsware) dynamically manages farms of virtual servers based on various metrics such as; time of day (follow the sun processing), batch jobs, processor load, users, etc.

The only bad thing about VMs is the one-time cost hit, and the learning curve on managing and storing the images. But in a data center, this helps fix the things that break most often (things that are touched, and things that are mechanical).