Business View

Server consolidation and containment (SCON) is where most customers start due to the compelling impact of increasing ROI.

Typical x86 servers house a single application and operate at only 5-15% utilization. By consolidating servers and running multiple virtual machines on a single physical server with VMware, you can increase hardware utilization by 60-80%. That’s a four to sixteen-fold improvement in efficiency!

Consolidation reduces hardware acquisition costs as well as reduce power & cooling, and space requirements.

For example, Siemens saved $4M with a 12:1 consolidation ratio. On average, companies with 200 servers consolidate to 25 servers running 200 virtual machines.

Key Considerations:

• How many x86 servers do you have?
• How quickly is that number growing?
• How much do your servers cost on average?
• Are you running out of power/cooling capacity or space in your data center?

Technical View

Now let’s discuss “how” server consolidation and containment is achieved.

Virtual machines are completely isolated, meaning that they share hardware resources without interfering with each other; so multiple virtual machines can sit on the same server. VMware dynamically and transparently allocates physical resources to each virtual machine.

Virtual machines are similar to physical servers because they access hardware resources, such as the CPU, RAM, and hard disk. They also run unmodified operating systems, applications and access storage resources; including shared storage, like NAS, iSCSI, SAN or Fiber Channel.

But, VMware virtual machines are superior to traditional servers. Why? Because they are hardware independent, portable and can be manipulated with the ease of file copy and paste.

Each virtual machine contains an application that is transacting data and believes it has dedicated hardware. The vast majority of applications can run in VMware virtual machines. With 4 virtual processors and 64GB of memory, virtual machines can even handle advanced workloads such as databases and email servers.

Over 90% of VMware users install virtual machines in their production environments. It’s well beyond the labs and supporting business daily.

Key Considerations:

• What is the average utilization of your servers?
• What type of workloads are you running in your data center?