Server Consolidation

To meet the constant demand to deploy, maintain, and grow a broad array of services and applications, IT organizations must continually add new servers. Traditionally, most applications have been developed to support a specific business area or function. These applications generally run on their own dedicated physical servers. Because there is very little, if any, sharing of IT resources between different applications, this can lead to fragmented infrastructures and often results in a lack of flexibility within an organization's IT environment. Companies struggle with servers that have low utilization rates, as the unused system resources sit idle and wasted. Costs for today's implementations are driven even higher as IT departments overprovision systems to ensure that processing power is available to meet demands for the specific business area being supported. Typically, server workloads utilize less than 10 percent of total physical server capacity, wasting hardware, space, and electricity.

Provisioning new servers is a lengthy, labor-intensive process measured in days and months, making it difficult for IT to keep pace with the rate of business growth and change. For example, the need to provision and tear-down test and development environments can consume valuable resources and time.

Virtualization Reverses Server Sprawl, Streamlines Provisioning

By consolidating multiple workloads onto a single hardware platform via server (or hardware) virtualization, you can maintain "one application/one server" while reducing physical server sprawl. This allows you to fully support your business with less hardware, resulting in lower equipment costs, less electrical consumption for server power and cooling, and requiring less physical space. Virtualization can also simplify and accelerate provisioning. Adding workload resources can be decoupled from hardware acquisition. If a particular business application requires additional capacity or requires that a new capability be added, provisioning becomes streamlined and immediate. In an advanced virtualized environment, workload requirements can be self-provisioning, resulting in dynamic resource allocation.

Environmentally Green

Efficient energy consumption is a critical issue for IT organizations, today. With energy costs on the rise, many data centers lack the power or space that IT services require. Industry analysts estimate the annual cost of powering a server will soon exceed its acquisition cost. By optimizing the IT infrastructure through server consolidation and dynamic management, organizations can save energy by reducing underutilization and server sprawl, power down servers without affecting applications or users, and "go green" with their data centers while improving service levels and decreasing cost.

Keeping Virtualized Servers in Check

While virtualization-based server consolidation can provide many benefits, it can also add complexity if the environment is not managed properly. The savings from hardware consolidation could be offset by increases in IT management overhead. The ease of creating virtual machines (VMs) can cause a sprawl that far exceeds physical server sprawl, and can outpace the tools used to manage them. Determining which physical servers have the best capacity for which VMs, and which VMs reside on which physical servers when doing maintenance or troubleshooting can also make server virtualization more time-consuming and difficult for IT administrators — not to mention more frustrating.