This sort of feels like an argument with someone who prefers to optimize the hell out of things in the best possible way. Thats a fair position to have and to

This sort of feels like an argument with someone who prefers to optimize the hell out of things in the best possible way. Thats a fair position to have and to take in this day and age. What virtualization allows you to do is optimize the organizational responsibility. If I am developing internally on my VM, when it gets certified by ops management, and rolled out onto the live VM stack, I can be very sure what I am being responsible for; the ops also can be sure (because they maintain a huge VM filesystem, mostly) that they don't have to deal with things at a very thin slice. For web operations, look, its simple: VM is good enough because there is so much overhead all over the typical web stack that a few frames of difference are, largely, irrelevant to the use case. Okay, don't put your multiplayer live realtime universe hashes in a VM; those belong bare metal. But the web front ends that are serving the same old content, over and again .. these are well worth putting in a package which can be massively deployed at whim. A typically well-packed VM, consisting of only the hand-optimized built image of a development team with this in mind, can be a very, very tight package. I've seen reflectors and mongodb proxies and so on, packed into 256meg boot image that can be replicated simply by giving it a new name .. deploy 2,000 copies of these VM's, and you have a massive solution to the front-door problem..