> why bother splitting a large server into a bunch of small virtual servers when it is cheaper to simply buy a bunch of small servers One word: flexibility. V

> why bother splitting a large server into a bunch of small virtual servers when it is cheaper to simply buy a bunch of small servers One word: flexibility. VMs can grow up to the size of the dedicated server they are on. These tiny hardware platforms cannot. They must resort to parallelism much earlier than more beefy servers would. (Not that I was accusing you of supporting the claim... merely pointing out that I think their idea is flawed... even if the hardware is neato!) Given a sufficiently parallelizable(is that a word?!) workload, these things could be total win though.