VMWare deployment -ROI to customer-is it real?

[SurvivorGT]

Hi all-

VMWare as a whole I feel is great! I have used the VMware 4.0 infrastructure and the like for yrs (3.0 to 3.5 platform too).

The bottom line question is ..... How is it cost effective here?

I realize the obvious, minimal server quantity (beefy quad core -max memory w/ beefy backend SAN/NAS implied here)-

These host servers, SAN appliances etc utilize power -a lot of power! And the more VM's you want to host ends up meaning more servers added to the Hosting infrastructure..
SO my friends, the ROI? is it real and how can you benchmark the results in the long run?

thanks for any links, urls, information in general!

Survgt

 

[IllogicallyLogical]

The ROI is definitely real and alot of elements come in to this factor. As you stated the host servers and SAN hardware may consume power, but imagine if every server you were running were physical. I imagine running 45 virtual machines across 3 host servers would consume much less power than running 45 physical servers. When you cut down on physical hardware in the datacenter, you are also reducing cooling costs. You are saving money on hardware as well, because you no longer need to buy a new physical machine every time you need a new server. You will also save on software licensing costs as well. Microsoft will let you virtualize up to 4 instances of the Enterprise edition of Windows Server under a single license. If you purchase a Datacenter license you can run an unlimited amount of VMs on the host that license is tied to. Without having to license Windows to a large number of physical servers, you can see how cutting back on these licenses will begin to keep some money in your wallet. You can also factor in your time. Setting up a virtual machine takes an extraordinary amount of less time than setting up a physical server. Management of servers also becomes much more efficient in a virtualized environment as well. I could keep going on about this, but you get the idea. I will provide a couple of links for you to take a look at as well. Hope this provided you with some of the information you are after.

- VMware ROI TCO Calculator

http://roitco.vmware.com/vmw/

- Windows Server Virtualization Calculators

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-calculators.aspx

- Licensing for Virtual Environments

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/about-licensing/virtualization.aspx

Have a look at the various APC TradeOff tools, especially the "Virtualization Energy Cost Calculator," to calculate energy costs in the datacenter.

- APC TradeOff Tools

http://www.apc.com/prod_docs/results.cfm?DocType=Trade-Off Tool&Query_Type=10

Joey
CCNA, MCSA 2003, MCP, A+, Network+, CWTS

 

[mrdenny]

The ROI is there. The last company I worked for, our VMware solution was four 16 core servers, connected to an EMC SAN. Without VMware we could have removed maybe 2 shelves from the SAN. Not much savings there. Those four physical servers held 90+ virtual servers. So if they were physical 1U machines, that's over 2 racks worth of machines, plus we'd need a lot more switches to connect everything up, so that's even more rack space. As we were at a CoLo that's real money saved every month in rack space, power and cooling.

We'll say three racks and power (need room for the switches) is easily $5-6k a month in savings, more than paying for the physical servers and licensing in just a few months. Granted the EMC hardware would have been a while longer to make up the storage costs, but it would have happened.

Denny
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[baddos]

Virtualizing also gives you more flexibility. If you lease your servers, it's a lot easier to swap out hardware when the lease expires and you now want a faster machine, etc.

 

[NetworkTek]

We are a small consulting company. Using our datacenter as an example we have definitely seen a big ROI. We condensed our datacenter down from 45 physical servers to 4 blade servers. The power consumption is much less and the cooling cost have gone way down. Overall we have seen about 35% decrease in energy cost. Not only that but from a management standpoint our datacenter is much more simplified now. It is also a lot more flexible.

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