While virtualization does allow users to 'expand or reduce' capacity on demand, most real life requirements are to expand and seldom reduce. A few applications have seasonal peaks but 99% are always growing.
The major bottleneck which arises with virtualization is that of I/O capacity. If you have multiple virtual servers, the I/O load rises very quickly. Frankly, most server hardware is not really designed for optimal I/O throughput. IBM mainframes have (at least for the last 30 years) excelled at I/O processing. This allows users to run VM on that hardware and actually have each virtual machine achieve decent performance. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, designers of VM software would do well to study and profit from IBM's experience in this area. They might find that Intel-based hardware was not the best choice for a hardware platform.
IBM can run Linux, native or virtual on its mainframes. If it were my choice, I would by Linux-based applications and run them on IBM's VM.
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