On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 2:09 PM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote: > >> If the future continues anything like the past, you'll be be able to >> buy something new with twice the speed and 10x the space by then and >> be better off starting over than allocating more than you need today. > > you are re-installing your servers permanently? For an unfortunately large number, yes. > i do not, i move the VMware-Images to new hosts / SAN storages > without any interruption and if you maintain them well this > works over many years and dist-upgrades Our servers dealing with financial exchange data live on the bleeding edge of capacity and can't afford the overhead of virtualization. So we end up replacing the backend servers wholesale every few years, re-purposing the older generation for less demanding tasks. But, within the realm of hardware with compatible drivers there's not a whole lot of difference in the effort to copy a VM image or a hardware image with clonezilla or a similar approach. I agree that VMware is great where it works, though. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com