Virtual v’s Physical Appliances – 4 Compelling Reasons for Change
The Need for Scalable Architecture - part III
However, industry research by VMware shows that the system usage per appliance can be as low as 15% of the available processing power. Effectively, the server budget is over six hundred percent higher than necessary. Maintaining a pool of idle servers on standby in case of increased load or for failure recovery, can adversely affect the efficiency even further. Amalgamating applications on each server can go a long way toward resolving the usage issues but at a cost. Running different applications on the same server loses the scalability of the appliance solution and can create security issues.
In addition, maintaining a homogenous environment of appliances is extremely difficult if not impossible. Complicating this is the need to upgrade different applications at different times. A new appliance can have a different platform configuration which will make it difficult to migrate users from an older appliance to a new one.
