Business Bloat

Working for an SMB that generally buys applciations and then thows them on to multiple sole use boxes virtualisation makes perfect sense. However much like when air travel got bigger planes and everyone said ther'd be room to streatch out; virtualisation will just make servers the cattle trucks of the data centre like long haul on a Jet is now the cattle truck of the sky.

As business starts expecting the ability of packing stuff in it will just increase the appetite for running more applications, not getting smarter about it.

My prediction is that virtualisation will have minimal to negligible impact on the consumption of servers. If you want a real impact problem look at the state of budjets and the economy. Without virtualisation as a possibility companies would simply cut application deployment to save dosh.