VMware solutions help customers meet their energy saving goals by enabling safe consolidation of underutilized x86 desktops and servers onto less hardware, both through initial consolidation efforts and dynamically as computing requirements change. This white paper explains how VMware virtualization provides the foundation for dramatically more energy efficient IT environments.
W H I T E P A P E R
How VMware Virtualization Right-sizes IT
Infrastructure to Reduce Power ConsumptionVMware white paper
Table of Contents
Servers Are Driving Energy Consumption and Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Server Consolidation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Dynamic "Right-Sizing" of Virtual Infrastructure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
The Environmental Impact of Right-Sizing IT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
A Revolution in the Datacenter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2VMware white paper
Rising energy costs and consumption in datacenters is a hot There are many factors contributing to excessive energy topic, whether you care about saving money, deploying new consumption in datacenters, but underutilized x86 hardware is IT services, keeping the datacenter running or sparing the the most significant. According to the EPA, servers consumed environment. As energy climbs the list of corporate priorities, 80 percent of the total IT load and 40% of total datacenter ii"Green IT" solutions are proliferating. Prioritizing potential power consumption in 2006. Site infrastructure-including fixes is not easy amidst this flood of information. There is no cooling of equipment-accounts for another 50 percent of silver bullet, but virtualization often tops the list because it total datacenter power consumption. Yet because x86 servers right-sizes the largest culprits of energy over-consumption - typically house only a single application, their processors sit underutilized x86 desktops and servers. In typical environments idle 85-95 percent of the time. While sitting idle, these servers these machines sit idle almost all of the time, consuming use nearly as much power as they do when they are active. significant amounts of power. VMware solutions help customers According to analysts, companies maintain roughly three years safely consolidate these machines onto much less hardware, of excess hardware capacity due to this vast underutilization. both through initial consolidation efforts and dynamically as With more than seven million servers sold annually, this computing requirements change. This white paper explains how represents more than 20 million servers sitting idle and wasting innovations in virtualization technology from VMware provide energy. This inefficiency is not only wasteful but expensive, a foundation for a dramatically more efficient and greener IT especially as electricity costs and computing demand continue environment to rise. As a result of increasing energy demands on inefficient and Servers Are Driving Energy Consumption and aging datacenters, many companies are simply running out Costs of power and/or capacity. Either the utility cannot provide Today's datacenters consume a lot of electricity. A recent report adequate power, or the equipment is so power-hungry and by the Environmental Protection Agency claims datacenters dense that the datacenter runs out of capacity even though in the U.S. consume 4.5 billion kWh annually, 1.5 percent of the datacenter is not physically full; energy costs preclude ithe country's total. Perhaps more importantly, this figure has investments in additional physical hardware.Analyst firms and doubled from 2000 to 2006, and is likely to double again in the industry research suggest that most datacenters will feel the next few years. This trend is affecting datacenters around the crunch soon, if they don't already. world and is likely to continue, given how central computing is Another challenge is the inability of IT staff to respond rapidly to our businesses and lifestyles. to changing business needs and computing requirements. IT loads can vary depending on the time of day or month, Figure 1. Rising Energy Consumption in the Datacenter and often grow over time as companies grow or the demand for applications increases. The static nature of a physical IT infrastructure makes it difficult to respond. Hardware is typically over-provisioned for peak load, because applications are very difficult to reconfigure to different hardware, once installed. For example, if a server is running an ERP application that ha... [download for more]
