The VMware/XEN/whatever bundle is not good for servers. It's good for
engineering/software companies that want to create and dismantle
And for hosting companies, which probably host the majority of the domains in the world...
Back in 1999 when Sun had its Solaris "domains" on the E10k it was VERY convenient to be able to carve up "sub-machines" out of the existing permanent hardware for different tasks and to dynamically shift hardware among them without having to loose one cycle of CPU of down time.
For instance Stanford university had an E10k shared between their finance department and some research doing lots of big-time simulations. At the end of the month a perl script would dynamically shift CPU's and RAM from the simulation domain to the salary-crunching domain according to the actual load.
--Amos
