Venyu Blog

Saving Money. Saving Time. If you’re in the IT industry you’re already familiar with the double-edged sword that hangs overhead every time you sit in front of your dashboard, diagnose a bout of downtime or help a user get back up and running. Indeed, just as you need to keep a sharp eye on uptime, management in turn is watching over you through a critical lens of what it costs — per job, per hour maybe even to the minute—to keep its systems and its administrators up and running.

Through virtualization guiding your way through those headwinds and over choppy currents that threaten to interrupt delivery of services can either be made easier or harder, but saving money and saving time go hand-in-glove in making the most of virtualization for your particular infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, this is not an either/or proposition, although this essay, penned by Ken Hess entitled “Five Good Reasons to Create a Virtual Infrastructure” places all of its bets on that first (and in Hess’ opinion) singular, overwhelming reason to virtualize your infrastructure: saving money. (As an aside I love Hess’ use of dollar signs as emblematic of the perceived savings available; using this methodology in building the case for a virtual infrastructure becomes a matter of realizing dollars based on the academics of lightening your server load layer by layer, rather than making it some impenetrable monolith that defies easy explanation). These include:

$. Server Number Reduction – When you decide to move to virtualization, one of the promises is that you’ll reduce the number of physical systems that you have to deal with. And, it’s true. Even if your VM per host density is 12 to 1, you’ve saved a lot of money by removing twelve physical servers from your inventory and placing them onto a single one. Sure, that single system is expensive, but is it twelve times more expensive than the total cost of the twelve single systems?

$$. Data Center Footprint Reduction – When you reduce the numbers of physical servers in your inventory, you also greatly reduce the amount of rack space you consume. That translates into a huge savings, especially if you’re renting space from a data center provider. In your own data center, it means decreased power and cooling, which can save you a bundle as well.

$$$. Maintenance Window Reduction – Virtual machines need maintenance but if you multiply the amount of time required to reboot individual physical systems by the number of years you service a system, the number is significant. Granted that this number is mostly Windows-oriented because patching of Linux and UNIX systems typically don’t require reboots. Regardless of the operating system involved, you’ll save labor hours waiting for systems to return to a usable state. VMs generally reboot in five minutes or less, while their physical counterparts can take almost a half hour–depending on attached hardware and system services involved in startup.

$$$$. Personnel Reduction – As direct, and maybe as unkind as it seems, the reality of business is that people are expensive. And, virtualization provides an excellent way to reduce personnel costs. You might have the same number of systems overall to support but since they’re virtual, the physical system support drops to near zero. Someone still has to support the virtual host hardware. However, if you reduce the number of physical systems from 300 to 30, you’ve greatly reduced the number of hands needed to touch that physical hardware.

$$$$$. System Management – Think of physical systems and then think of virtual ones. Can you add an additional hard disk remotely to a system, while it’s running and make that disk available to it? No? You can with a virtual machine. You can also add network interfaces to a VM without physically touching it. If you receive a request to add an additional 50GB to a VM, you can provide usable space to the system in less than five minutes. Same with network. Adding additional CPUs and memory requires a shutdown but you don’t have to trudge into the data center, pop a case, insert the hardware and boot backup–a process that could take an hour or more from badge-in to badge-out at the data center. Instead, it takes less than ten minutes to perform that same action on a VM. Time is money and that’s a tremendous time savings.

As you can see virtualizing servers not only saves money, but also time, giving you the opportunity to manage your workload more efficiently and fluidly while avoiding any chance that sword I mentioned in the first paragraph from making any, well, headway on you during your daily shift.

For more information on server virtualization, contact Venyu today.