Last time, I talked about the upcoming Server Blade Summit, which is subtitled “Blades & Virtualization: The Perfect Marriage.” IBM is holding its Blade System Insight event agenda.aspx this week and virtualization figures prominently in that event, as well.

With companies looking at both blade servers and virtualization as ways toward data center consolidation, it makes sense that the industry is rolling out events and literature addressing the match-up. As I mentioned in my earlier newsletter, Barb Goldworm, president and chief analyst of Focus Consulting, recently published a book entitled “Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs”.

Goldworm and co-author Anne Skamarock spent the last year taking a hard look at blade servers and virtualization. Goldworm says she originally was asked by the publisher, Wiley, to write a book on blades, but she knew that enterprise users needed information beyond the hardware.

“Users look at blades as a hardware component and virtualization as a software component that together can take them to the next level,” she says.

For the most part, users seem to be interested in blades and virtualization for consolidation efforts, she says. It’s not surprising since blade servers now are just as powerful and capable as rackmount servers so it’s not out of the question to expect the small systems to support multiple virtual workloads. That wasn’t the case in the early years.

“Everything you can get in a rack, now you can get in a blade,” Goldworm says. “And there are tremendous efficiencies in terms of power and cooling. Blades are actually more efficient and take less power and less cooling per server [as compared to rackmount servers].”

Goldworm says the book itself is not aimed at selling readers on blade servers or virtualization. “I’m not trying to sell anything,” she says. “I’m trying to say why blade servers and virtualization are a good fit. As building blocks, how they can take people to the next level.”

The book includes pragmatic information, including checklists for buyers looking at blade servers and virtualization software.

The virtualization checklist, for example, includes a number of things to think about including how the virtualization software supports hardware assists in Intel and AMD processors, what guest operating systems are supported, how they support paravirtualization and whether they support the ability to move running virtual machines.