While reviewing http://www.gotitsolutions.com/ I came across this post:

http://www.gotitsolutions.com/2006/09/09/smp-clusters-and-virtualization.html

RJB responds to an interview with “Cluster Expert Don Becker”. In the interview Mr Becker claims “Virtualization doesn’t solve any problems.” This is a very bold statement, and in my opinion an ignorant one.

In the interview it would appear Mr Becker feels he needs to defend clustering.

Mr Becker states: “some people talk about virtualization in terms of being able to predict a machine is about to fail and migrating that virtual machine off that physical machine. That completely ignores the I/O problem. If you have a virtual machine on the physical machine, you’re probably using local file systems on that machine. If you migrated off that physical machine, you have to forward all of the I/O — which is painfully difficult to do — or have it already set up to use a network file system, remote I/O or network-attached storage.”

My Becker apparently hasn’t learned about VMotion, or VMFS, or ESX…

Now I’m not saying that he doesn’t have a point. He’s just being over-zealous in his comments. I think RJB hit the nail on the head: “I think the title should maybe be revised to ‘Virtualization doesn’t solve all problems’“.

Read the interview here:

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid94_gci1213083,00.html?track=NL-653&ad=563843&asrc=EM_NLN_509727&uid=3198141