Virtualization, Do Not Turn Cost Saving Into Money Wasting

Virtualization has become the cornerstone of every enterprise's favorite money-saving initiative. By reducing the numbers and types of servers that support their business applications, companies are looking at significant cost savings. Less power consumption and a smaller server footprint is simpler to manage.

Beyond the potentially dramatic cost savings, virtualization can greatly enhance an organization's business agility. Also, this technology offers the potential for a fundamental change in the way IT managers think about computing resources.

Server virtualization brings a lot of benefits to the organization. However there are some challenges presented to the IT operations as well.

Cost Justification

When implement virtual solution for data center, we need to clearly understand the business requirements and carefully plan for the capacity and infrastructure growth. If not it will actually posts a very big challenge for IT operations. Very often we see resources being wasted due to many different reasons such as whether resources can be shared among different applications due to security consideration, ongoing project postponed due to the budget constraints or resource conflicts. Hardware for the virtual infrastructure has its life cycle, when resources cannot be fully utilized within its life cycle, resources will be wasted. A typical example will be virtual infrastructure implemented for the project, the idea is to consider easy future expansion so resources were planned for the next six months or a year, then often the case the project delayed and resources sits there. After three to five years hardware resources need to be refreshed and new investment has to put in place.

Resources Calculation and Planning

Even though organization’s data center usually has a resources and capacity planning team, the reality is if you browse most of the organization’s virtual infrastructure you will find out that overall around 40 to 50 percent of resources are always idle. While a lot resources sitting idle new resources continue to be implemented as some of the resources are not suitable for some applications. While virtualization provides business with agility, it is with the extra costs. We often see that even within one data center, due to the fact that data center needs to provide infrastructure for different business units and due to some regulation and policy, applications cannot run on the same hosts thus more hardware and licenses will needed.

Virtual infrastructure management

For a large organization it is very complex to manage such virtual environment, user access rights and admin access rights to different farm, folder and resources are all need to be managed. Multiple virtual center servers, different version control and so on.

People are always talking about the benefits of virtualization but if we do not plan or architect it well, resources waste can happen easily. Instead of cost savings, it actually turns into money wasting.