Practical Virtualization Solutions: Virtualization from the Trenches

Chapter 12. Form-Factor Choices and Their Implications

If you’ve recently bought new x86 hardware you can probably skip this chapter; chances are it’s well suited for virtualization, and it’s also highly unlikely you’ll receive additional money for new equipment.

If the servers you’re planning to virtualize have been hanging around since they were last used for Y2K, or if they were purchased in the dot-com boom, don’t even consider using them except maybe for test and dev for inconsequential applications. For all practical purposes, if you’re going to effectively implement a virtualization strategy (and by strategy, we mean anything more than ten boxes), hardware that came out in the past three years is in order.

The adage stating that ...