Denise Dubie has a great article on virtualization management capabilities and a great quote describing the upcoming battle between VMware and Microsoft for the x86 virtualization market, he is quoted as saying:
"The enterprise is going to be very leery of Microsoft, but the on-ramp to VMware is a bit steep for small businesses. VMware doesn't want to lose that potential business, but the company was getting a bit drunk on enterprise dollars," says Thomas Bittman, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst.
The abundance of enterprise dollars spent on virtualization is because virtualization fixes so many problems, reduces power, reduces physical requirements, makes x86 hardware more efficient, increases uptime, allows resource management at the OS workload level, etc.
One of my favorite reports is one that IDC did in 2006 – it depicted– IT investment to be higher spending in Year 1 on a VMware / virtualization project but that in Year 2 and Year 3 and possibly Year 4 – IT departments would avoid spending on server hardware – you would just fill up the empty capacity of the system you built in 2006.
It looked good on paper, spend more now, avoid spending later.
Unfortunately, multiple issues caused IT departments to run out of capacity, VM sprawl occurred, single core and dual core servers could not hold as many VMs as the equivalent quad core servers.
Often P2V migrations went unchecked, servers have excess CPU capacity but not enough Memory, VMs are consuming too many resources and as a result enterprises are oversizing virtualization projects or not driving up VM density to get the biggest bang from their investment.
Avoid the hangover from “getting a bit drunk” and having to purchase new hardware, more memory, bigger servers, etc. by getting a resource management tool in place and understanding what resources your VMs are using and where you have capacity in virtualized environments.
1 comments:
I disagree with Thomas Bittman's statement that "the on-ramp to VMware is a bit steep for small businesses". It can be done for small dollars, but small dollars makes for small profit for the partners and VARs selling the solution, and they are very much drunk on enterprise dollars.
VMware's VI 3 Foundation Acceleration Kit (VMware VirtualCenter Foundation + VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation for 6 processors) is $2,995 plus $629 / $749 SnS (Gold/Plat), or for cheaper again one can get just two CPUs of VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation for $995 and $545/$645 SnS (Gold/Plat).
For under $6k you can get a Dell 2900, okay so it is a pretty minimal config of one quad core, 8GB RAM and raid1 400gb SAS, but even that is sufficient for several VMs. Add CPU, RAM and disk as you grow.
Concerned about complete hardware failure? Spend another $6k on a second 2900, remember we still has that unused second CPU license for VI3 Foundation (I'm not 100% certain that this is legal...), and replicate your VMDKs.
This is far from an enterprise solution, and the low cost makes for little profit for the solution provider. But it does enable a small business to consolidate.
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