Virtualization Daily

CIO Update is running a short article “The Pros and Cons of Virtual Appliances”. The perspective here is for the Enterprise and the conclusion isn’t particularly positive.

While virtual appliances seem like a very good concept, in most instances they actually suffer from the worst problems of both software and appliances, and are really not yet mature enough for mainstream production use.

Hopefully they will mature as a market, and overcome these significant problems, because they show great promise. In the meantime EMA recommends enterprises seek to take advantage of their benefits for trial, demonstration, and proof-of-concept purposes only.

I’d like to say I disagree with that conclusion, but I don’t. For the enterprise space, I agree, virtual appliances are quite immature. Management, security and general integration with the enterprise environment just aren’t there yet. That being said though, I don’t see the real value of virtual appliances being in the enterprise space anyway. It’s the SMB market where the existing IT infrastructure is much more primitive that will see the greatest benefit from the technology.

Virtual appliances represent a powerful vehicle for the delivery of fully managed services into the SMB environment in a way that was extremely cost prohibitive when the appliance concept required dedicated hardware. It’s going to take a few years for things to mature for the enterprise space, but over the couple years we’ll see a number of interesting developments appear to deliver services to the SMB market.