Making the choice between virtual and physical servers – Why Choose?

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the future of the physical server is secure, as there are still a number of reasons to use a physical server over a virtual server.

Making the choice between virtual and physical servers | Servers and Storage | TechRepublic.com

Scott Lowe writes about is experience and the policies in use at his place of work for the deployment of virtual machines versus physical servers. He states that the usual policy is to use VMs for everything unless there are compelling reasons for a plain physical server. He gives, as examples, Microsoft Communication Server instances and other examples where high I/O or CPU utilization would seem to preclude the use of or need for virtualization.

I’d like to suggest an alternative. One I’ve touched on before and one that my not be fully applicable in all instances with the software and hardware currently available:

All servers should be configured with a hypervisor as the base configuration. Even if the server will only run one OS and application it should still be installed as a VM. The main reason for this is HA/DR and provisioning time. There are undoubtedly performance issues that might need to be addressed, but modern server hardware, especially when combined with 10GBE can handle pretty much anything thrown at it.