In server consolidation, physical servers (1) are converted to Virtual Machine (VM) files, which can be centrally stored and managed (2) and dynamically deployed based on load and available resources (3). This reduces the number of required physical machines, while dramatically improving server utilization and business agility.

With greater demand on IT to solve business challenges, data centers quickly fill to capacity, and each new server purchase increases capital and operating expenditures as well as power and cooling costs. At the same time, servers are underutilized. Typically, server workloads consume only five percent of total physical server capacity, wasting hardware, space, and electricity. Because of application compatibility issues, IT has to separate applications by running them in different silos and on different servers. This often results in significant server sprawl.

Provisioning new servers is a lengthy, labor-intensive process measured in days and months, making it difficult for IT to keep pace with the rate of business growth and change. For example, the need to provision and tear-down test and development environments can consume valuable resources and time.

Virtualization Reverses Server Sprawl, Streamlines Provisioning

By consolidating multiple workloads onto a single hardware platform via server (or hardware) virtualization, you can maintain “one application/one server” while reducing physical server sprawl. This allows you to fully support your business with less hardware, resulting in lower equipment costs, less electrical consumption for server power and cooling, and requiring less physical space for the server farm.

Virtualization can also simplify and accelerate provisioning. Adding workload resources can be decoupled from hardware acquisition. If a particular business process requires more capability (say, a web commerce engine), adding this capability becomes streamlined and immediate. In an advanced virtualized environment, workload requirements can be self-provisioning, resulting in dynamic resource allocation.

Keeping Virtualized Servers in Check

While virtualization-based server consolidation can provide many benefits, it can also add complexity if the environment is not managed properly. The savings from hardware consolidation could be offset by increases in IT management overhead. The ease of creating virtual machines (VMs) can cause a sprawl that far exceeds physical server sprawl, and can outpace the tools used to manage them. Determining which physical servers have the best capacity for which VMs, and which VMs reside on which physical servers when doing maintenance or troubleshooting, can also make server virtualization more time-consuming and difficult for IT administrators – not to mention more frustrating.

Microsoft's Server Virtualization Solutions

Microsoft enables you to realize the benefits of server consolidation and provisioning without the risk of added complexities and inefficiencies. Using System Center Virtual Machine Manager, you can automatically determine which servers are the best candidates for virtualization, convert them to virtual machines and provision them to the right hosts in minutes, rather than the weeks or months it takes to procure and configure physical servers manually. Using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V™ you can increase server infrastructure flexibility and security while saving time and reducing costs though eliminating the need for physical servers. (Virtual Server 2005 R2 will still be available for Windows Server 2003 environments).

And that's just the start. If you have Terminal Services servers, you probably have many silos separating conflicting applications. In that case, you can use SoftGrid Application Virtualization, which enables any application to run alongside any other without conflict, letting you consolidate silos and eradicate the management hassles associated with them.