Opinion: Virtually guaranteed

The comment box below allows plenty of room for all those who’d like to point out that Citrix and VMWare weren’t the first etc etc.

Now, if you are an enterprise data centre jockey, you’ve probably already saddled up the virtual horses and ridden off into the sunset for a well-earned holiday on the massive savings you’ve delivered to your bosses. But if you’re a small business data dude or dudette, you probably just dream about going virtual and know you’ll never ride off into the sunset. That was until Microsoft dropped Windows Server 2008 in our laps. You won’t get the boss to spring the extra dollars to make your single server branch offices virtual, no matter how often you bombard the bugger with the PowerPoint-proof of virtual’s virtues.

But the upgrade to Windows Server 2008 is a no-brainer, heck it’s probably already in the budget, and besides they’re puling the plug on support for the old 2003 version anyway so you’ve gotta upgrade. And then you can get virtual.

No need to send your precious dollars anywhere else. Your good buddies at Microsoft are looking after you. Yeah right. If they were really looking after us they’d have built Server 2003 on a virtual platform. De-coupling the operating system and the applications from the hardware is so frikkin’ obvious it’s no wonder it was first thought of a long time ago by the mainframe makers.

And Microsoft has always wanted to replace the mainframe so why the heck didn’t they take a good look at what their enemy was doing before they launched the war? Well, same as most warring factions I suppose – they just thought the enemy was pure evil with nothing to offer. Nostalgia not being what it used to be these days, there’s no point pining for the past, we might as well be grateful for what we’ve got. And Windows Server 2008 with built-in virtualisation is what we’ve got. Or soon will have, when they actually release the virtual bits of the thing. Any virtual day now.