It’s easy to find good things being said in the IT media about virtualization. It’s less common to encounter some sobering thoughts. That’s why a particular dire litany in a recent Eaton Corporation white paper — written by Eaton’s manager of distributed power solutions, Chris Loeffler — caught our eye.
“For all its advantages, virtualization brings some unique challenges,” he writes. “Overall data center power consumption will be lower, but each server will draw more power. There will be fewer servers, but each one will be more critical than ever. Applications can be dynamically moved around as needed, but the support infrastructure cannot do the same. Data center footprint will be smaller, but overall data center efficiency might still be suboptimal.”
We don’t want to imply that virtualization isn’t a great technology. But Loeffler’s comments are reminiscent of the scene in the movie “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” when Pee Wee announces, “It seems everybody has a big ‘but.’”