Last Friday I spent half an hour inside one of our smaller server rooms to fix our development VMWare ESX box. Its called development because its a Dell box and it takes a good five minutes for it to get past the BIOS and SCSI controller load screens. That was the first and last Dell server I think we bought. However what had happened is that the powered had failed the day before and even though we managed to take the machine down, I think the UPS serving that server room had failed after the backup generator also failed which meant that the machine didn’t go down cleanly. However when it came back up it ended up failing and unable to find a root partition. I’ve broken enough Linux boxes to recognize the error and realize the solution is really simple, just fix up the fstab which is all I did and magically the box started working properly. But this lead me to an interesting thought.

Consider an all Microsoft shop who had never considered Linux before but wanted to virtualise their products. The best product to do this from what I can tell is the VMWare ESX platform which is really a small Linux hypervisor and then their own management tools underneath. The aim is that the end user never has to see the Linux back end they only see the graphical tools for Windows like Virtual Control Centre or the web based interfaces.  This leads me to the funny thought that a pure MS shop that had perhaps sworn off Linux might be deploying ESX because it is the best option out there (MS hasn’t brought out their solution yet, thats waiting on their Longhorn Server product), an entire Microsoft world virtualized under Linux.

It makes you wonder where the world is heading.