I love virtualization and all the perks of it. I would hate to have to manage as many physical boxes as I do virtual machines. After all, how easy it is to manage/balance/upgrade/deploy solutions to meet the needs of my environment.
But is P2V (physical to virtual) really a curse more than a blessing? For example, I have many virtual boxes here that used to be physical that should have been decommissioned and replaced with new solutions. Because they are virtual we have just learned to accept that they are doing the job and are good enough. This for me has lead to many overlaps in systems and is just starting to get overgrown.
I’m not saying its my predecessors fault, because I would have and have done the same thing. After all its easy, and its really cool. I’m saying in the long run it may be more of a band-aid, leads to unnecessary virtual servers and just buy you time to procrastinate.
The next revelation for me is to combine services. I don’t need a server just to run WDS or WSUS, it’s just a waste of software licenses.