I visited a large customer last week with a couple of engineers.  It is always useful for folks from engineering  to meet real customers. It grounds you, let's you understand what the real issues are.

Maybe its just me but most problems within IT organizations are non technical, caused by the organization of a company rather than the technology required to solve a buisness problem.

Throw in outsourcing partners and life can get complex to say the least.

The customer described one non technical issue they had as they rolled out  Solaris 10. They looked at zones/containers and said this rocks  each developer can have a "system" to develop on without impacting each other
at no cost but.......

HP delivers their system adminstration service and wanted to charge them for each zone as a seperate system. The customer was clearly "unhappy" and they are working the issue with HP.

HP seem to view server virtualization as a revenue generation engine, less effort more billing. I know many of the folks that developed zones and I've never heard it described it as a way for HP Professional services ( or anyone else ) to increase revenue ;)

Hopefully this was just one service sale rep thinking Christmas came early and that Sales Junket, a tropical beach, plam trees swaying in the breeze, drink with an umbrella was in the bag.

P.S ZFS ships soon so for the record the self healing, reduced adminstration, increased performance and instant snap shots are not a opertunity to increase charges.