September 28, 2009, 6:31 pm
This is perhaps the third part of an accidental series* on removing bloated and unwieldy operating systems (OSs) from our data centers. In exchange for our traditional fat and happy OSs, we’ll have sleek, tireless and agile workloads. It might be too early to remove years of tradition all at once, so it’s possible that the interim solution is to use appliances where full physical servers or corpulent virtual machines once proudly gobbled system resources. Appliances might be the transitional technology we’ve waited for.
For now, let’s assume that you’ve made the quantum leap from physical to virtual in your company via server consolidation and “right sizing.” You assumed that your consolidation efforts took a big bite out of your unpleasantly plump data center footprint but it hasn’t unless you trimmed the fat in the physical to virtual transition. Now you’re battling virtual machine sprawl and running into licensing issues. Do you require less disk space than before your efforts? It’s time to correct again, which brings up the question, “Will appliances replace standard VMs?”
