Reduce The Data Center Footprint

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Transferring physical servers over to the virtual machines and consolidating them onto far fewer physical servers are one of the best ways to save power and cooling costs in the data centre. This helps to save space as well as reduce greenhouse emissions.

Reduce the data center footprint

Server consolidation with virtualization will reduce the overall footprint of your entire data center, as well as save more of your company’s green with a smaller energy footprint. That means far fewer servers, less networking gear, a smaller number of racks needed -- all of which translates into less data center floor space required. That can further save you money if you don't happen to own your own data center and instead make use of a co-location facility.

QA/lab environments

After completing a server consolidation exercise in the data center, why not donate that hardware to a QA group or build out a lab environment? Virtualization allows you to easily build out a self-contained lab or test environment, operating on its own isolated network. If you don't think this is useful or powerful, just look to VMware's own trade show, VMworld. This event creates one of the largest public virtual labs I've ever experienced, and it truly shows off what you can do with a virtual lab environment. While this is probably way more lab than you'd ever actually need in your own environment, you can see how building something like this would be cost prohibitive with purely physical servers, and in many cases, technologically improbable.

Faster server provisioning

Server virtualization enables elastic capacity to provide system provisioning and deployment at a moment's notice. This allows your data centre administrator to quickly clone a gold image, master template or even a existing virtual machine to get a server up and running within a few minutes.

Remember that the next time you have to fill out purchase orders, wait for shipping and receiving, and then rack, stack, and cable a physical machine only to spend additional hours waiting for the operating system and applications to complete their installations. I've almost completely forgotten what it's like to click Next > Next > Next.

Reduce hardware vendor lock-in

Thanks to virtualization, hardware vendor lock-in isn’t a problem because virtualization abstracts away the underlying hardware and replaces it with virtual hardware. Because of the virtual hardware data center managers as well as owners gain a lot more flexibility when it comes to the server equipment they can choose from. This can also be a handy negotiating tool with the hardware vendors when the time comes to renew or purchase more equipment.

Increase uptime

one of the greatest benefits of virtualization is the ability to quickly and easily move a virtual machine from on server to another. Virtualization also has other features that increase uptime such as live migration, storage migration, fault tolerance, high availability and distributed resource scheduling. These features help keep virtual machines online or give them the ability to recover quickly from unplanned disasters.

As the technology continues to mature to the point where it can do long-distance migrations, such as being able to move a virtual machine from one data center to another no matter the network latency involved, the virtual world will become that much more in demand.

Improve disaster recovery

There are three important components that virtualization offers to an organization when creating a disaster recovery solution. The first component is hardware abstraction capability. A disaster recovery solution no longer needs to have the identical hardware specifications to match the product environment because of the virtual hardware feature. Second, by making inexpensive servers an organization can more easily create an affordable replication site. And third, most virtualization platforms have software that helps automate the failover when a disaster dose strike.

Isolate applications

Server visualization provides application isolation without wasting 90%-95% of the CPU and memory by fully utilizing the physical server resources, and removes application compatibility issues by consolidating many of the virtual machines across far fewer physical servers.

Extend the life of older applications

Your Company may and probably have old legacy applications still running in your environment. These applications may not run on a modern operating system or on newer hardware. Virtualizing and emulating the application in its environment can extend its use as well as help maintain server uptime, instead of searching for a modern application to replace it.

Help move things to the cloud

Ah yes, the cloud! You knew it was coming at some point in this list, didn't you? As much as you think you've been talked to death about virtualizing your environment, that probably doesn't even compare to the amount of times in the last year alone that you've had someone talk to you about joining "the cloud." The good news here is that by virtualizing your servers and abstracting away the underlying hardware, you are preparing yourself for a move into the cloud. The first step may be to move from a simple virtualized data center to a private cloud. But as the public cloud matures, and the technology around it advances and you become more comfortable with the thought of moving data out of your data center and into a cloud hosting facility, you will have had a head start in getting there. The journey along the way will have better prepared you and the organization.

Vmware vSphere 5.1

VMware is the proven choice for virtualization from the desktop through the datacentre to the cloud. More than 350,000 customers of all sizes, including all the Fortune 500 (top 500 ranking stores in America), have chosen VMware as their virtualization infrastructure platform.

Cost-per-application $3,495

Market position: Position 1

vSphere 5.1 was released 10th Sep 2012

Microsoft Hyper-V