Let's say you have a farm of VMWare servers. You have application A in one VM, and application B in another VM on the same physical server. For whatever reason, the load on application A takes a sharp spike upwards. In your scenario of A and B installed on the same physical hardware, you are pretty limited in your options. Call some poor engineer in the middle of the night, pray you have a spare server, get that app B installed on the new server, and hope everything works. In the VM world, you just grab the VM for either app A or B and move it to a lower utilization server, with no significant downtime. I believe with VMWare 3.0, this process can even be automated to a large degree.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say you have a farm of VMWare servers. You have application A in one VM, and application B in another VM on the same physical server. For whatever reason, the load on application A takes a sharp spike upwards. In your scenario of A and B installed on the same physical hardware, you are pretty limited in your options. Call some poor engineer in the middle of the night, pray you have a spare server, get that app B installed on the new server, and hope everything works. In the VM world, you just grab the VM for either app A or B and move it to a lower utilization server, with no significant downtime. I believe with VMWare 3.0, this process can even be automated to a large degree.