New whitepaper and demo - VMware Consolidation - VMware Converter

Just got my paper through legal. I like it. Simple story, kind of same ol' ... same ol' ... story with the main reason people seem to use VMware. Consolidate old machines and save bunches of money on less hardware, less cooling, less power, less maintenance costs. You know, the whole, "less is more" story.

Problem was that everything around this story is outdated and focuses on consolidations from PIII servers. PIII's !?!? ... those things are almost a decade old ? Who has those laying around the datacenter ?! If you do, you either have the most efficient coders on the planet writing your applications, or your manager has the tightest purse-strings ever.

So I said to myself, "self ... how about some tests using some modern day Xeon procs from about 2-3 years ago that customers would care about consolidating ?" ... So that's what this paper is all about. I used 3 older servers from HP, IBM, and Dell with single core Xeons at 3.06 GHz and 1 MB cache - no slouches here, heavy hitters even to this day. I then ramped up a workload to 30% CPU utilization and measured the workload output .... again, 30% CPU, prob more than most servers get a chance to do. Then migrated the physical servers to VMs using VMware Converter 3 and reran the same tests, and added more of the VMs running the same workload until I pegged the CPU Utilization on the ESX server at 80%. The procs on the ESX box where actually SLOWER GHz-wise than the older servers (Intel Xeon x5355 quad core 2.66 with 8MB cache.)

We were able to get 8 of these VMs onto a single Dell PowerEdge 2950. So you can throw away 8 boxes (yeah right ! .. ebay here they come.) So you save all that space, and you get those boxes off lease, or recover some costs. But look at the power savings. It amounts to over 2,000 watts. Wait, let me make it more dramatic ... 2 KILOWATTS. Multiply that by the amount of time you leave the servers running, and the cost of electricity in your area, and the savings are well over $5,000. Just download and read the paper, or check out the wiki to get the details.

If you want to save even more, just make sure you are coming off HP servers, they used more power than the other two, with the same configuration !

Get the paper, demo, and talk about it on our wiki - just click on this link.

Demo of VMware Converter is here, along with all the other demos.