Pursuing a development career or hobby makes people lose their minds.  The kinds of thought processes so prized in the community are detrimental not only to the world at large, but often to the developer himself(or herself.)

Forcing people to classify everything in the world, and often to classify it as good or bad, is NOT a good way to look at the world.  Seeing everything in processes is a very simplified way to look at our subtle and nuanced existence, and despite your opinion of your brain’s power, you cannot possibly “model” the complexity of most things in your mind and believe it to be fully accurate.

Once developers get into this mindset, they start doing insane things like throwing out their furniture because they only sit on it 10 percent of the time, or eat out of a frying pan so they’ll have to wash one less dish.  Eventually they will throw out their dishes because they only use them a certain percentage of the time.  The world is not about efficiency, its about experience.  Don’t let your passion for efficiency and procedures keep you from enjoying the beauty this world has to offer.  Stay human, please…even if it means you’re not going to be the perfect dev.

My reply is as follows, and should be interesting to anyone considering the viability of server virtualization in small and medium businesses.

We’re using virtualization extensively in production, but ONLY for low usage or administrative functions like Anti Virus reporting, automated software updating, basic file and print services, etc. We’re also using it in production for smaller offices that need to keep hardware costs down while only supporting a few users. We’ve got an entire 10 person network running on a single server running exchange, SQL server for a custom inventory application, and your typical network support software like file and print services, software updating, mobile communications, and threat prevention. We’ve got a spare sitting just below it powered down for emergencies, and the virtualization kept our costs down while allowing us to avoid the irritating software conflicts common to server software.

I think, without a heavy investment into some serious enterprise grade communications and networked storage technology, you can’t get the kind of performance that most of us demand from our SQL servers for a reasonable price. The price to performance ratio is the key to SQL’s widespread virtualization in the future, and it may never get there for small and medium business due to our inability to justify the huge investment in infrastructure that is required.

That being said, we’ve got quite a few virtualized solutions that are using SQL Server in a low utilization scenario (like spam filtering software) and it has worked wonderfully. Likewise for testing environment where virtualization has been an absolute godsend. I think that it all depends on the size of your enterprise and the utilization of the software you’re running when making a judgment on whether or not virtualization is right for you.