Virtualization Means Cost and Energy Savings
The Windows IT Pro editorial
team looks at dozens if not
hundreds of products every year,
and picking one winner out of all
those in a particular category is
always a challenge. That predicament
is further amplified when we consider
a product for our most prestigious Product
of the Year award. VMware ESX Server
3.5—a subset of the VMware Infrastructure 3
bundle—made our decision easy this year.
Virtualization has shaken the IT industry
to its roots over the past few years, and no
product influenced that sea change more
than the ESX Server family. In an interview
with Windows IT Pro, VMware President
and CEO Diane Greene mentioned how
virtualization is generating tangible, significant
cost and energy savings for IT administrators.
“We estimate that there have been
at least six million workloads virtualized
since 1998,” says Greene. “If we figure 7,000
kilowatt hours for every physical server that
is virtualized per year, that goes to 39 billion
kilowatt hours. [That translates] into about
$4.4 billion saved, which represents enough
energy to power Denmark for a year.”
Positive Changes for IT Infrastructure
In addition to the energy and cost savings
that ESX Server 3.5 has generated, it has also
helped radically redefine how IT pros manage
their infrastructures. Michael Cisek, the director
of emerging infrastructure and operations support for PITT OHIO EXPRESS, has relied
on ESX Server 3.5 (and the VMware Infrastructure
3 bundle) to radically revamp his
IT infrastructure. “We’ve been able to reduce
our server pool using server consolidation,
often at a fifteen-to-one consolidation ratio.
Our server deployment time went from days
or weeks to minutes and hours, thus reducing the overall development cycle of new products
and application,” says Cisek. “We’ve also experienced
zero-cost hardware replacements [by
using virtual machines]; when equipment
begins to fail, we perform physical-to-virtual server
conversions … We’re also in the process
of converting to a virtual QA infrastructure.
Our goal is to have one-to-one representation
of all mission-critical applications for QA and
testing. Finally, our developers used to maintain
multiple physical workstations: one for
production, one for development, and one for
QA. We’ve been able to consolidate all three of
those functions onto one physical PC by using
VMware Workstation.”
The impending arrival of Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V will mean more competition
for VMware in this rapidly growing
market segment. If VMware can revolutionize
the IT industry in an unopposed market,
what can it do when motivated by an
aggressive competitor? It’s shaping up to be
an exciting battle, one that every IT administrator
(and penny-pinching CFO) will be
watching with interest.
—Jeff James