run multiple copies of Leopard Server on one machine that can already support unlimited users with just one copy of Leopard Server. Or is it useful as an instantaneous backup or something.

It's useful if you have several different server apps, and some don't play nicely with others. Or you want to keep different services on different 'servers' for security and/or structural reasons. It's also good if you have apps that require older versions of an OS, but Apple's previous license doesn't allow that, so, the benefits for that, at least, won't be seen until 10.6 (although, to me at least, that's open to interpretation, as nothing clearly said before you COULDN'T run multiple copies of an OS on the same server).

Of course, though, the biggest issue is the license. Apple's license says you HAVE to run the OS on an Apple-branded computer. The huge benefit of virtualizing your servers is to buy a bunch of big ol' server machines and run a good number of different OS'es on them.

What Apple wants people to do, of course, is buy their XServes so you can run OS X on that. They don't want you just buying the OS and running it in a VMWare window on that 16-core Dell server in your closet (and people call Apple a software company).

in server environments, virtual servers are useful to have multipe physical servers each running a redundant virtual setup. This is great for load balancing and dynamic allocation of server resources. You can perform updates and maintenance without taking down any services.

Answer, extremely useful. The standard home user will care less, but this is a HUGE + for OS X Server pushing into the medium to large corporation environments (where most of Window's strong hold has been).

Virtualized server environments are the way of the future. Ever seen one of the IBM "go green" commercials for the IBM System z9 BC mainframe? Those are virtualized server environments, gives you an approximate 10 servers to 1 beefed up controller (some even better ratios with better hardware). This cuts energy costs, cooling costs, space requirements, & makes management easier & more efficient.

Think of the cost and what you could do with purchasing 1 server to do the work of 6. With that savings you can beef up the disk throughput with a SAN and STILl save money.

and no one said ALL of your VM's had to be OS X server, either.

Well, only partly useful in pushing OS X into the server room. Because if you've got those IBM servers, the one thing you won't be able to do is run OS X on them.

This isn't Windows, where the server and OS architecture strongly pushes you to running a single instance of a server on each instance of an OS. OS X is Unix, and most UNIX application servers should have no more difficulty running multiple instances under OS X than under Solaris or Linux or any other UNIX implementation, with at most a "chroot" to keep them from 'marking' each other's lampposts.

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