Virtualization or server consolidation to improve performance?

Server consolidation is a fancy name for moving multiple applications onto fewer machines. Running more apps on fewer machines raises hardware utilization rates and reduces costs. Unfortunately, with server consolidation, often disparate applications conflict with one another, rely on different versions of lower-level components and pose challenges in problem isolation. In other words, server consolidation can use up even more expensive people resources. In many cases, server consolidation sounds good in theory, but can cause problems in execution.

Virtualization is a terrific technology for IT organizations. It enables them to take advantage of very powerful hardware, yet reduce the number of machines they have to administer and track. Free, open source Xen is a small virtualization product that you can test out to see if it's the right option for your data center.