Wow - 8 instances of Exchange for 8000 mailboxes? With a single instance of Citadel or Zimbra you can run tens of thousands of users.

You can literally replace dozens of Exchange servers with a single Citadel server and the Citadel machine will be practically zero maintenance too.

This was a commercial article, of course. But anyway, as @herman mentioned, the Exchange reference is a little strange? Has Exchange really gone so bad, hard to believe but possible.

Now, as usually, they (VMware) are touting capabilities which have been in virtual world ages, at least since 70's as far as I know. Of course they are new in PC world which still has a long way to go before the hw / systems are on the level mainframe virtualization was a long time ago. Virtual is real, nice.. Separate execution and management.. Fault tolerance - maybe they should look a little closer why Stratus way hasn't been so successful in real world, NonStop still beats it for a reason.

Anyhow, good to see that at least the (VM) development didn't end when some key people left.

Mr. Balkansky makes an interesting point that many applications are unable to take advantage of all the power provided by multi core processors. The same is true for applications running on the FT technology demoed by the company at VMWorld 2007 and 2008. Absent SMP support, only apps capable of running on a single core will run on this future software. Far more robust fault-tolerant virtualizaton solutions are available now.

Ken D.

Stratus Technologies