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Virtualization is a revolutionary technology that is dramatically changing the computing landscape. Although enterprises were generally the first to jump on the virtualization bandwagon, virtualization is an amazingly versatile, surprisingly affordable technology that has the capacity to right a whole lot of wrongs for IT organizations of all sizes. And the benefits are tremendous.
Frustrated by low server utilization levels? Lack the space to expand your infrastructure, the budget to buy new hardware, the resources to deploy new hardware? Lack backup/restore capabilities? Grappling with outof- control power and cooling expenses? Virtualization has the answers to all of these very common, yet frustrating, IT challenges.
Virtualization can help companies of all sizes vastly increase server utilization levels, delay or avoid hardware purchases, and expand infrastructure capacity without increasing physical space requirements. Plus it makes hardware deployment easier, helps bring power and cooling expenses under control, and provides backup and restore capabilities to ensure business continuity.
How does it work?
Traditionally, IT organizations have dedicated servers for each application, with each server configured to handle the peak load of the application it hosts. In these environments, most server capacity goes unused most of the time—and average utilization rates of less than 25% are common.
By virtualizing your server resources, you reduce the need to configure servers with excess capacity. By allowing several applications to run on one server without interfering with each other, you can decrease the number of servers you use.
Capital and operational savings
By reducing the number of servers you use, you can dramatically reduce your hardware acquisition and server management costs. Plus, since you’ll also be using less power, less cooling, and less space, those costs are likely to drop as well.
The savings that result from virtualizing your infrastructure generally fall into two categories: capital cost savings and operational cost savings. Capital savings come in the form of reduced hardware acquisition and data center real estate costs.
- Moving to a virtual environment reduces the number of physical servers and storage necessary to support your infrastructure.
- An ancillary benefit is the possible redeployment of some existing infrastructure as part of a disaster recovery solution. This is made easier using VMware solutions and provides additional cost savings.
- Virtualization helps you avoid the cost of data center expansions. With building costs ranging from $800 per square foot to a projected $5,000 per square foot in 20091, this is a very important area for cost savings, especially when one considers that each rack of servers or storage requires approximately 7 square feet.
Operational savings are substantial as well, with reductions in power and cooling costs, management costs, and costs associated with application downtime.
- Every server removed from the data center results in approximately $800 per year in power and cooling savings.
- Virtualizing allows you to achieve up to a 10x reduction in server provisioning time, which in turn leads to reduced infrastructure management costs.
- By enabling faster recovery from unplanned downtime and allowing for better management of planned downtime, virtualization further reduces indirect costs. Total payback time for virtualization projects is typically less than one year due to the significant capital and operational savings.
Usage scenarios
How can you benefit from virtualization technology? Take a look at the following five usage scenarios. They list the most popular uses for virtualization solutions and explain the unique business benefits each type of implementation can bring to midsize businesses like yours.
- IT optimization: Virtualization enables your organization to optimize its server resources for improved utilization and reduced IT complexity. When you virtualize resources with HP ProLiant servers and VMware Virtual Infrastructure solutions, you can easily migrate from an underutilized, overprovisioned physical environment to a virtual environment with fewer, more reliable systems. By doing this, you’ll use less hardware, which means you’ll reduce your real estate requirements (and expenses) as well as your power and cooling requirements and your management costs. Need more capacity? No problem. Virtualization allows you to add virtual servers and storage to host new applications without adding new hardware. And when it is time to add and provision new physical servers, HP and VMware make the process easy.
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