Why we go virtual?

I guess one of the main things when your boss tells you we need to go virtual is try to map out where to start , lets say you work in a middle sized company lets say..

Web 

• 2 to 4 dns ervers  
• 5/10 webservers
• 2/4 databases

Qa/Stg/Dev
10/20 application servers / databases / dns etc etc

Mid office

• 1 fileserver
• 1 email solution
• 1 internal database

Let's assume the common scenario where you are using Apache/Bind/Mysql for your web stack
and Windows 2008 /Exchange / SqlServer for you office things

When i started to use VMware i was very very skeptical , for many different reasons such as : it isn't going to perform , i don't trust vmotion , i don't trust the back-end storage , i don't trust the memory distribution and reservation  , i don't trust other apps sucking all the memory up etc etc
All these concerns are very valid you need to be sure where you are getting into , at the end of day whatever hypervisor you go with it will be the backbone of your infrastructure.

To me it seemed very logical to start with something that wouldn't affect either production applications nor business as usual systems , so i decided to virtualize our QA environments.

It's kind of simple to see that it's always easier to deal with internal developers if something goes wrong than with either customers or excel users that want to access a db etc etc.

Next post:
p2v ,  kernel settings for unix ,  vmware tools ,  and a few words on choosing the back-end storage protocol and appliance.