Speaking from VMWare land here, YMMV if you're Hyper-V (more on that later)

What we do is a soft lock on our first AD server, SQL box behind VirtualCenter* and vCenter* server so that they are always on host #1. If there's some maintenance going on, we have to disable that rule just to take down host #1. It will move if that box fails, but not before. In the case of a dark datacenter we know to turn that box on, connect to it directly and fire those three boxes up in order. Beyond that it's back to business as usual.

There's a doc from VMWare about why to keep one physical AD server, but I can't remember why.

Now if you're on Hyper-V you get to deal with one of the stupidest architectures, in my opinion. If you're using the clustered filesystem, you need AD to mount it. If your AD server is on the clustered filesystem, you can't mount the shared FS. I guess you *really* need a physical AD server in that case. Why exactly do you need something so high level as AD to get to something as low-level as a filesystem that's behind something as low-level as the hypervisor is beyond me. I could see for high level, tightly integrated services, but at this level it's just bad design. /rant

* we don't do that any more because we've had a run on bad HBAs that cause SAN issues, and there are problems managing your hosts on the san when your san is having problems. They're still virtual, just not on the cluster, on a standalone box on the side built for 'special' cases.

iSeries is already "kindof" virtual, especially if you're using VIOS.

I was at a conference in Vegas last August for a certain industry leading virtualization vendor. While in one of the keynotes, I was happily using my corporate IM and citrix on my tablet. As soon as they got to the 'future products' section of the CEO's presentation, I lost wi-fi on the tablet. As it had been flaky all day, I tried to tether to my phone. I tethered to it just fine, but then found I had no cell signal. As soon as that section of the talk was over my cell and wi-fi signal magically came back to full signal.

Seemed rather coincidental, and also rather irresponsible. Large room with several thousand people in it... and depending on how large and/or directional this 'outage' was, could have been hitting a good chunk of the highway out back of the hotel too.

Maybe by a rope and your backwoods service jockey.

Winch it onto a flatbed, even locked wheels skid. Can't get to an end of it because it's parallel parked? There are these funny little things that scoop each wheel and then you basically push it sideways to wherever you CAN lift it. If you are towing something with AWD without a flatbed handy? Lift one end like anything else and use the wheel-scoop style things to jack the other end off the ground and tow it on them.

There are ways, and a good tow service knows them.

I have to agree there. Almost every point he made made me say "but my Xoom does exactly that." Granted there are like a total of 3 ICS devices in the wild right now, and the number of old devices that will get it is a mystery, you CAN have those features he desires. It's almost as if he didn't realize that there was another option to iOS, webOS and... Windows Phone 7(and the future 8)? Seriously, how did Windows even make the list??

I thought maybe it was alphabetical

Good luck with those web forums when your millions-of-dollars-an-hour-in-lost-revenue business is down beyond it's maintenance window while you wait for those web forum responses for your obscure edge case you ran into during $someMaintenanceTask. Even better luck with that once the response comes back 'RTFM noob!'.

Real IT checks their pride at the door and pays the man for proper mission critical support when you're dealing with enterprise infrastructure.

So 38% of virtualization customers are planning on switching, but 2/3 of all virtualization customers are VMWare with the other 1/3 being somebody else. There's a lot of floating data points here.

We can come up with lots of fun theories...
Maybe VMWare numbers will drop to 30% of the market and those will all get sucked up by Hyper-V.
Maybe everyone using Hyper-V thinks it blows and are going to Xen, leaving 22% of the original survey to allocate to leaving either VMWare and Xen for one of the two they're not using.

Connect the dots any way you want, but without knowing which camps the answers come from, this is a non-story. You probably see a lot of churn in the minds of decision makers, but nothing gets done anyway once they get to planning strategies, or crunching the numbers, as another commenter here said.

Your first point is slowly becoming less of an issue. With vSphere 5 you can now run a Linux appliance for Virtual Center which will do for starters, and it doesn't even require (or support) an external database. Hopefully this will expand to be the only way to get VC, but they'll expand it to use a DB when you get big enough, and make plugins work with it. There's also supposed to be a '75%' web client, e.g. good enough for 75% of tasks and a full web client in the next major update, (5.5?) That's how VMView has been for at least the last major release too, the previous might have been web too, I can't remember.

They have a lot of products because they do a lot of things... regular old server virtualization, enterprise grade server virtualization with HA, desktop (I want a test box), desktop (VDI), disaster recovery (with a replicating san), disaster recovery (without a replicating SAN)... If you don't know what you want to do, looking at their product sheet won't help you any.

I'll give you that vRAM is evil and sales people are douches, but isn't that one a given?

You must not be reading the marketshare numbers. They are still selling quite well, by themselves... but not compared to anything. There are still tons of iPhones selling but if you add up the numbers of all manufacturers of Android phones you see they aren't in the lead any more.

I'll give you point 1, but point 2 means you must live under a rock. Given that limits can be upper and lower, you must never have seen a minimum speed sign. Let me provide one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thetruthabout/2727717062/

I don't know how wide spread these are, but they definately have them across the river from me in Minnesota.

Mod parent up!!!

Also worth noting that this can easily affect a decently sized business for internal communication unless worked around. To quote that same page:

For example, we have 60ish branches, each has it's own group. Often when we send out company wide stuff, or 'everybody but the corporate office' notices, the message will get sent to 60+ internal groups. Granted we should have an 'all' group, with tight restrictions, but we don't. Imagine if our helpdesk has a critical system they're notifying everyone about or like happens today, branch down notifications... or if HR gets busy some day, that's 10 job posting notices and/or anything else that person sends out. Yes there are better ways to do this, but that's how it is done today on 'not the cloud.' If we move to the MS cloud somebody's going to get a nasty surprise on message 10 and have to re-think their workflow.

Again, I know we're doing it wrong, but I guarantee we're not the only ones

From TFA

By this ruling, It would seem that all companies that are just patent holding companies are not allowed to do anything with them unless they produce a product. That would appear to be too good to be true, so going to just file this article away in the "yeah right, that's a good one" file.

Depending on your jurisdiction and the implementation of $myShotgun->magazine, your while loop may lead to a condition where fire() fails due to insufficient resources in $myShotgun->ammo. To be proper you probably want there to be either a break (which is usually frowned upon) or another conditional on the while loop. Alternatively, or also, a call to $myShotgun->loadAmmo(); if $myShotgun->ammo == 0 wouldn't be a bad idea.

Just sayin... you need to be complete with your intentions.

Dodge and I think it was BMW made lots of noise about this being a built-in option a few years ago. I know I could get a module in my Ram that made it a wifi hotspot for a cell phone on data, just like my Thunderbolt does today. I'm sure others have quitely added it as well since then.

This was a big deal for people that had too much expendable income a few years ago, but now you can just do it with your own Droid/iPhone probably for less than the car data option. Add in the Verizon MiFi (and if anyone else makes something similar... I don't know) and this is now a product searching for a market.