Mind you, he has servers to sell, so salt, grains and all that good stuff…

Erik Dithmer, general manager of Small Medium Business Americas for Dell is telling SMB’s to hold their horses on virtualization. Gene Marks, author of “Penny Pincher’s Almanac,” writes in BusinessWeek:

For many small businesses like mine, Dithmer doesn’t recommend it. Thanks, Erik. I completely agree. Virtualization refers to the process of installing multiple “virtual” servers on a single computer. The idea is that instead of having a bunch of machines operating at only a fraction of capacity, put a single machine more fully to use. IT guys and computer companies have been drooling over this stuff for years.

Why? Because many IT guys are just like Balloon Dad. They like to make claims about virtualization to suit their own personal aims. Balloon Dad seemed to be pitching a new reality TV show. For IT guys, the aim is to persuade clients, particularly small business clients, to panic and fly into action and adopt an unnecessary technology just to make a few more bucks for themselves.

Obviously, this article was aimed at the technologically unsophisticated SMB set. If you have a handful of well-managed and reliable systems in your server room/closet, then it’s simply not worth upsetting the balance. However, some SMBs are small businesses in name only.

While the employee count may be minuscule, some small businesses control some massive IT resources, and it’s these that can really benefit from the virtualization’s energy saving potential. Also as one commenter noted, other benefits include the redundancy and flexibility that comes from decoupling operating systems and critical apps from hardware.

The lesson? Just like no two small businesses are the same, neither are their IT requirements. Do your research, dabble in the technology (VMware and Microsoft have freebies and trials that give you a sense of what the tech can do) and go into your meetings with vendors informed.