Virtual Machines, great way to learn nothing (Score 1)

Virtualization? Sure, it will help you learn about managing a Linux/Unix/WhateverIx box, but it won't help you in optimization. Why do I say that? It won't teach you that SCSI rules over ATA for performance. It won't teach you that you can get better performance by separating your data from your transaction logs. It won't teach you about how easy it is (or hard) to recover from a hardware RAID failure vs. a software RAID failure (you can do the software in a VM, but not the hardware). It won't teach you the pain of recovering from dead hardware when you don't have identical hardware to replace it with (easier under Linux in some cases, much harder with Windows). Then again, virtual machines are becoming the production machine of choice for many corporations. If you want to learn something useful, learn VMware ESX and XEN (and it's commercial iterations). So maybe you don't need to know anything about real hardware.