That's indeed what Shorter's group found. "Virtual Iron will tell you their overhead is between 1 percent and 3 percent, but a 3 percent difference on a 10-minute [database run] is not noticeable," Shorter says. "It's just like native. The driving force for going to a virtualization strategy was cost, but we've tested it, and performance is also a driving factor."

Shorter estimates he can run seven to 12 virtual servers per single-core processor node on existing systems. As the newspaper transitions to quad-core systems over the next year, he expects to be able to support around 30 virtual servers per physical node.

Jason Lochhead, principle architect at managed hosting provider Data Return LLC, says the company is already seeing benefits from hardware-assisted virtualization within the server infrastructure it offers its customers.

A year ago, Data Return introduced its Infinistructure utility computing platform intended to allow customers to maximize server utilization and more economically create on-demand compute resources through the use of server virtualization. Using Hewlett-Packard servers based on AMD Opteron processors, Data Return has been able to create hundreds of virtual server instances for customers within its data centers in Dallas and Pleasanton, Calif.

"We don't have as much wasted hardware capacity and have lowered power and cooling bills by consolidating these physical servers with the use of virtualized machines," Lochhead says. "It's much cheaper, particularly when you're talking about adding servers for redundancy rather than performance."