We've gone from 63 physical servers to 5 ESX hosts, a couple of SANs and 7 non-virtualised servers in 18 months. Historically we would have bought 15-20 servers in the past year (replacements, upgrades, new products) - this year we've bought one more ESX host.

Virtualisation is having a massive effect on the server market - coupled with the unprecedented economic downturn. I suspect there will be huge changes in the server market in the next two years, with some major amalgamations, takeovers and firms going to the wall.

Regarding aircon - have you seen the intelligent power management in ESX? It absolutely rules - I've seen data center demos where power consumption can be cut by ridiculous numbers simply by efficient use of Vmotion & DRS. For the larger enterprise, although it comes with heavy caveats (training, staff aversion due to job cuts, serious problems with major outages like the timebomb SNAFU in 3.5u2 last year) ESX is like manna from heaven in times of economic strife.

Your bang on the money with that one. Virtualisation is one hot topic at the moment, although in 3 years time, it won't make companies in the IT Channel any more money. SaaS is another hot potato at the moment. 2 years ago, SaaS accounted for under £1m of the total IT channel revenue. This year, it's £3bn.