It would be easy enough to brush Steffen off on a partisan basis. He's not only a big user of Microsoft's Hyper-V and other virtualization products, he's THE big user, or at least the leading poster child for Microsoft virtualization products—which come under fire regularly from VMware and the rest of the industry for their inflexibility and lack of the kind of management tools that let you shift VMs around at will.

Kroll's top IT people and CEO surprised the rest of the company's tech crew by deciding in 2003 (the Bronze Age of x86-based virtualization) that the company would base its whole data-center strategy on virtualization and (ack!) would do it with Microsoft products.

The second part of the decision actually came later, after Microsoft promised all its newest technology, support direct from the dev teams, and regular air-drops of virtualization specialists to get Kroll up to speed up to acceptable performance levels.

Kroll is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a typical Microsoft virtualization shop, Steffen offered, about 30 seconds into our first conversation. He doesn't apologize for the ridiculous levels of support Microsoft has offered, but he doesn't apologize for Microsoft's faults, either.

Without extraordinary help, especially in the early days, Kroll could not have met the high service-level criteria that are absolute requirements in the credit-reporting business, where unquestioned data security, five-nines availability and sub-second response times are non-negotiable.

In that kind of unforgiving environment, shifting an application and its VM from one physical server to another -- which increases the possiblity that minor differences in configuration, access to data, patch status, or even location within the network could cause a production server to glitch or cross -- is what's technically known as a "stupid risk."

Duh.

I knew that. The only data center managers willing to make changes to an active application or server are those eager to experience the thrill of job hunting and unemployment-insurance acquisition.

How many production apps or servers get patched or updated while they're actually running, compared to those that get patched on a regular schedule when they're scheduled to be offline for some limited time anyway?

"Most of Cisco's big-iron devices have dual power supplies and so forth, for redundancy," Steffen says. "But when you're showing someone around on a tour, do you pull out one of the plugs to prove it works? If you did, someone like me would be there ready to strangle you."

"I don't know what the risk is, but it's an unnecessary risk," Steffen says. "I can't think why I would do a hot move as opposed as a cold move."