At some point, novel and forward-thinking concepts and practices become standard and commonplace, and the terms associated with them go by the wayside. Where special terminology had been in use to differentiate the old from the new, the new becomes the old, and the specific qualifiers drop from the conversation. When was the last time you heard someone ask for unleaded gas? There's no longer a need to qualify the concept because unleaded is the new regular.
So should it be with server virtualization. During the Great Virtualization Pilgrimage of the last five years, the number of virtual servers has exploded, whereas the number of physical servers not running virtualization hypervisors has fallen. In most infrastructures I've seen in the past year or so, virtual servers vastly outnumber their physical counterparts, including the very physical hosts that give them life. Maybe it's finally time to begin the process of flushing the "virtual" qualifier when discussing projects and apps.
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Why bother? To avoid confusing the nontechnical, for one. Most people understand what a server is in gross terms. As with an automatic transmission in a car, they get the idea it does something, and you interact with it, but the underlying functions might as well be ancient Greek.
However, when you start discussing a virtual server, that understanding begins to teeter. Visions of futuristic Hollywood virtual reality nonsense begin to cloud the issue, and sometimes even concern over the viability of this "virtual" server because it doesn't really exist since it's virtual, right?
In any case, it's vastly simpler to dispense with the notion of virtual servers in nontechnical overview discussions and just label them servers. In fact, it's generally OK to forgo the qualifiers even in technical discussion. In many places, it's just assumed that virtual servers will be deployed rather than physical servers, unless the project has a clear and documented need for physical hardware. That coin has been flipped for the vast majority of working IT shops.
