A month ago I and my friend were discussing IT budget, and it becomes very interesting when we started discussing virtualization. Let me brief you the case: with the growing business usage of IT infrastructure increases and that increases the usage of energy and space. Apart from this, there is another side; are those resources getting utilized at optimum level? Well, at some cases yes but in most of the cases it doesn't - source.
One would think if this really requires? I would say, yes, it is required. Let's take an example here; company Ax Inc is managing its 200 servers at its datacenter at Bangalore. Let's say a single server which utilized at 60% consumes 350 watts, now let us calculate -:
| Unit | Rate | Amount |
| Up to 100 | 2.90 | 290 |
| 101 to 200 | 3.60 | 360 |
| 201 to 300 | 4.20 | 420 |
| 301 to 400 | 4.45 | 222.5 |
| Above 401 | 4.70 | -- NA -- |
Bill generated for single server | 1292.5 | |
(Figure 1)
Further, calculating this amount for 200 servers would make 258500/- INR per month (US$ 5609.45 per month, as of 23-Feb-2010 according to CurrenciesDirect). If we also consider the bill for cooling systems and miscellaneous expenses it would be much more. In addition, add licensing costs, resources which manage and maintain this IT Infrastructure will add some extra burden.
Is there a solution for this? Yes, there is a solution for this – Virtualization. Virtualization is great technology which helps us to utilize our IT infrastructure at the max and lower down the costs. You must be wondering how this can be possible, and if it is; how to implement this solution!!! As I said above, our discussion was turned very interesting – the solutions are to implement "Virtualization". Virtualization – a methodology of dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments, by applying one or more concepts or technologies such as hardware and software partitioning , time-sharing, partial or complete machine simulation, emulation, quality of services, and many other.
Lowering power consumption: As I shown you in the above calculation in figure 1, 200 servers would generate whooping electricity bill - 31,02,000/- (2585000*12) annually. This is just an example and that to without considering cooling system.
Now, if you have hardware with Hyper-V you will be able to have your multiple servers on it. You can even host with Linux. And, naturally with lower numbers of servers your electricity bill goes down significantly.
Ease of Deployment: With the use of Microsoft Virtual Server Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager you will be able to optimized your physical and virtual resources.
- Centralized virtual machine deployment and management
- Intelligent placement of virtual machines
- Integrated performance and resource optimization
- Fast physical to virtual and virtual to virtual conversion
- Leverage and extend existing storage infrastructure
- Scriptable using PowerShell
- Live migration
- Hot add/remove of VHDs, pass-through disks
- Server consolidation
- Comprehensive application and service level monitoring
- Update management
- Software distribution
- Operating system deployment
- Ease of Backup
Conclusion: Virtualization helps a lot to save energy by consuming less power, save resources, and make IT administrator's life easy by server consolidation, deployment of patches and updates and even migration. As I have said in my previous post about embedding security to your product or piece of code, you may have the same tight security mechanism implemented with Virtualization- refer the document. Microsoft's own websites like MSDN and TechNet which has 1~3 million hits a day runs 100% on Hyper – V.
Cumulatively all this effort saves a lots of money by reducing IT costs, this makes real sense to me because it makes my life easy and as IT cost is down my client is happy with the solution.
Further reading:
Videos:
Virtual Labs:
References:
http://www.mybengaluru.com/resources/2248-Bangalore-Electricity-Tariff-Hike.aspx
http://www.spec.org/power_ssj2008/docs/SPECpower-Methodology.pdf
I agree that virtualization is a good idea...have you ever heard of cloud computing...that relieves you of datacentre burden
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