Hi! I’m the product manager responsible for virtualization at Rackspace and would love to chat with you about our dedicated virtualization offering. Since you didn’t have the opportunity to speak to a specialist as part of your earlier interaction, I will do my best to satisfy your questions in your blog post.

Our dedicated virtualization customers have dedicated physical hosts on which Rackspace will deploy multiple virtual machines specific to our customers’ needs. The physical host/hardware emulation layer is fully managed by Rackspace using a management infrastructure and Rackspace also fully supports our customers’ virtual machines (in the exact manner that we support traditional, physical machines. Our customers’ specific configurations (dedicated firewalls, load-balancers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux VMs vs Microsoft Server 2003 VMs per host, SAN storage, etc) are completely tailored for each customer. There are no shared physical hosts or firewalls as part of the offering.

Costs: Each customer’s cost will be different based on these custom configurations. In general, customers who can consolidate multiple VMs per physical hosts can save anywhere from 10-30% compared to traditional hosting configs.

I hope this helps.

Rob