Quoting from The Register:
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“Our applications don’t run on anything smaller than a data warehouse,” said Google engineer Luiz André Barroso, while speaking last week at the Usenix event in Santa Clara, California.
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By data warehouse, Barroso means a facility with software spread across thousands of systems. Google has announced at least four such $600m systems in the last few months just in the US. This type of scale has Google working on software problems, energy issues and component conundrums beyond the realm of conception for most companies. For that reason, Google has largely bypassed the Tier 1 server and software vendors’ pitches.
For example, Barroso noted that he “loves” the people at VMware but doesn’t plan to use their software.
“I think it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization,” he said. “It is hard to claim we will never use it, but we don’t really use it today.”…
Read the whole article at source.
Possibly Google doesn’t see a benefit in hardware virtualization but probably has different opinion about application virtualization approach since earlier this month acquired GreenBorder.