Quite a lot according to a Dennis Chung, an IT Pro evangelist based in Singapore. Dennis recently, profiles a server virtualization project that he did for O2Micro where his client saved an estimated $115,000 in three years.
Here’s is an overview of this server virtualization case study. As an IT Manager, Dennis’ client Bernard needed to meet the business process needs with IT infrastructure that is cost effective, and positive ROI. In the past months, he’s been working on virtualizing his computing environment. Bernard was to planning to increase computing availability from 18 to 70 computing servers world wide distributed across 6 geographical locations. The computing infrastructure needed to be efficient, cost effective, easy to manage and deploy, saves power and maximizes utilization of hardware.The current server utilization stood at at an average of 15% to 25%.
Bernard commenced on a project which involves 8 Windows 2008 Hyper-v Hosts, and also implemented System Center Virtual Machine Manager, aka SCVMM. SCVMM allows you to have a single view in entirety of your infrastructure. By harnessing the agility of virtualization, Bernard was able to easily move virtual machines around easily in the infrastructure. In Bernard’s project, he managed to save lot of money, in both hardware costs, and licensing costs. Instead of purchasing 70 sets of hardware, he got away with just using 20 sets of hardware. In licensing, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise it allows him to run up to 4 VMs on the host without having to pay extra licensing costs.
The big saving of course came with the power consumption. By decreasing the number of servers and increasing server utilization to 40-50% Bernard project is estimated to save the company $115,000 in the first three years. Add to these savings all the other benefits of server virtualization project and you can see why virtualization is the #1 focus for most IT departments according to the Gartner Group. For complete details on this virtualization case study see David’s blog. If you see other great case virtualization case studies please submit a link to the article below.
Posted under Hardware Virtualization, Server Virtualization, Virtualization Case Studies, Virtualization Products / Reviews
This post was written by Kevin Normandeau on November 3, 2008
