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.
