Server consolidation through virtualization

Back in the era of mainframes, virtualization was the norm.  Hardware was expensive and service bureaus sprang up that outsourced computing power which allowed companies to get started in information technology but not have the high outlay of costs associated with building their own technology centers.  As time progressed and the cost of computer hardware and software was reduced, many companies began to build their own IT staffs, and with a PC on every desktop, virtualization usage was reduced.

Over the years, IT professionals have noticed that the costs of not using virtualization technologies resulted in a large number of deployed servers all of which were underutilized but had a distinct purpose in life.  To add to that, the costs to power and cool these servers, as well as the physical floor space costs continued to grow.  As many companies began to look into server consolidation efforts, virtualization began to emerge again as an important technology, providing scalability, greater fleixbility, and increased availability at all levels of computing. 

What is virtualization

Virtualization is a method taking a physical resource and presenting a logical view of these resources to the end user. These resources may be a CPU, memory, an I/O device, or any other component.  By abstracting these devices, one physical system may actually now encompass a number of logical systems, each with its own distinct operating system image.  In other words, one physical system running on a Red Hat Virtualization Platform may support a Development environment, a Preproduction environment, and a Production environment.  To the end-user each one of these systems looks like a complete physical system, but in reality you have one physical server and three logical servers.

Why Virtualize

Server consolidation

In Server Consolidation projects, virtualization may allow you to take the load from multiple servers that have a relatively light load and move them onto larger systems, combining these resources to maximize the use of the hardware.  In taking this step you are reducing the physical footprint of your environment, the costs to power and cool the equipment, and also making the best use of your financial resources, reducing your overall costs associated with maintaining your server environment. 

Hardware abstraction

Deploying an older operating system and applications on new hardware is easy.  Instead of looking for a new 3COM or LINKSYS Ethernet Card, a virtualized system may see the a network card such as an Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] 79c970 [PCnet32 LANCE] (rev 10), which has very standardized drivers across the industry.  The result, easier and faster deployments of virtualized "guest" operating systems.

Resource management and high availability

With the ability to move guest instances between systems, outages can be reduced and server migrations can occur live.  Even better, a consistent virtualized server environment makes the deployment of disaster tolerant configurations simpler, practical, and trustworthy.

Operational Flexibility

Respond quicker to business demand with the ability to make dynamic resource management decisions and changes, provide, faster server provisioning and improved desktop and application deployment.  Do you need a test environment and you just found out about it?  With virtualized environments you could have a new environment running in a manner of hours, rather than having to wait to order new equipment, run cables, etc.

How are you using virtualization?  Provide your thoughts and/or comments below.