Eric Lai was among a host of writers to pick up on a recent Sage Research report that showed less than stellar interest in virtualization. While he reported the research factually, I don’t think he made the critical connection. The reason the survey showed low interest is that users have figured out what vendors and the surveyors haven’t - virtualization by itself isn’t a solution to anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a BIG believer in virtualization AND feel the folks at VMware deserve the payday EMC gave them. However, all the hoopla about virtualization got way out of hand over the past twelve months.

To see what I mean, consider one result in Sage’s report, “. . . 28 percent of respondents said they were interested in server virtualisation to support a shift to utility computing . . .” What? Exactly how does Sage consider that even possible. Clearly they were coached by the vendor community.

So, here’s my somewhat less than humble opinion (because this time I’ve got more than a hundred customer meetings to back me up) virtualization, while useful, creates new problems. Virtual machine images are no easier to configure or manage than servers. In fact, they’re considerably harder to manage precisely because they’re virtual. To top it off, most tools being delivered to manage all those images are simply a rehash of server management; lists and databases. Therefore my conclusion is that interest in virtualization hasn’t waned at all, but that leading edge users have hit snags and are trying to figure out how to really make use of the technology. Of course, I have my own ideas about the solution