Can virtualisation reduce energy costs?

How much does virtualisation support an organization’s efforts of going 'green' and ubiquitous computing?

From my experience, datacenter power and cooling are two of the biggest issues facing IT organizations today, and growing companies need a way to control these costs while enabling future expansion. With more efficient datacenters, IT organizations can better manage increased computing, network, and storage demands, lower energy costs, and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) all while remaining competitive and able to meet future business needs.
Underutilized desktop and server hardware is at the root of the problem.

Desktops and servers run at average utilization rates of only 8-15 percent yet while idle consume nearly as much power as they do when active. Hardware capacity is typically over-provisioned because it is hard to adjust dynamically. The result is too much hardware that is highly inefficient at delivering IT services.

Consequently, many IT organizations are looking for solutions that can help them reduce their energy costs and consumption while at least maintaining service levels and responsiveness to the business. VMware virtualization is a proven solution for increasing energy efficiency, and many major utility providers now offer financial incentives for virtualization-based desktop and server consolidation projects. VMware virtualization solutions have a positive impact on the environment as well as the financial bottom line. Every server virtualized with VMware is equivalent to removing 4 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the environment or taking 1.5 cars off the road annually

VMware customers reduce their energy costs and consumption by 80% through virtualization. Most servers and desktops today are in use only 8-15% of the time they are powered on, yet most x86 hardware consumes 60-90% of the normal workload power even when idle.  VMware virtualization has advanced resource and memory management features that enable consolidation ratios of 15:1 or more which increase hardware utilization to as much as 85%.  Once virtualized, a new feature of VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) called Distributed Power Management (DPM) monitors utilization across the datacenter and intelligently powers off unneeded physical servers without impacting applications and users. With VMware virtualization customers can dramatically reduce energy consumption without sacrificing reliability or service levels.

What are the infrastructure layers that can be virtualized? And where should the virtualisation process begin?

The best thing about Virtualization is that it is a technology that can benefit anyone who uses a computer. Millions of people and thousands of organizations around the world—including all of the Fortune 100—use VMware virtualization solutions to reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilization and flexibility of their existing computer hardware.

Virtual appliances relieve customers from the headaches of software installation and maintenance so they can focus on the value that software provides. Customers can deploy the application within minutes and begin using it immediately. Every component of the virtual appliance is pre-configured and optimized by the ISV who has the deepest understanding of the application, thereby eliminating interoperability issues. The ISV serves as the single point of contact for the virtual appliance, reducing the number of vendors the customer must engage with. Security is improved because customer data remains onsite with the virtual appliance in the customer’s data center. In addition, virtual appliances are built with a thinner more secure operating system, customers will know they are deploying a solution that is less vulnerable.

Calculating ROI for virtualisation is a challenging task --how can CIO's justify an investment in this area?
Over 120,000 companies of all sizes and across all industries are using VMware and its partner products to simplify their infrastructure, dramatically reduce costs while improving service levels, and provide cost-effective availability and disaster recovery solutions to all of their applications. 100% of the Fortune 100 and 95% of the Fortune 1000 deploy VMware products. 85% of customers deploy VMware in production with 46% standardizing all or most new applications in a VMware virtual machine. The performance, quality, and ROI of VMware encourage 90% of customers to recommend VMware products to others.

How can organisations use virtualisation to get  legacy systems more agile?

This problem is quite evident in BPO’s as such organizations needs to establish the same level of security for the outsourcing provider that it maintains on the corporate network. Sending corporate desktop assets outside the protection of the corporate infrastructure (and in many cases outside of the country) can have severe repercussions if customer data or company IP is compromised.

In sectors like BPO and ITeS, one IT cost that is often overlooked when businesses outsource their business processes is the difficulty of application integration. Most businesses have custom or legacy applications that are critical to the business but not easily integrated into other IT environments. Businesses can incur unforeseen costs and delays trying to get these applications working with server-based computing technologies.

With VMware virtual desktop solutions, BPO vendors simply access desktops over a remote connection. There’s no change to the applications running in a virtual environment.

The challenge of providing third-party BPO vendors full network access while maintaining security is being met by a new class of secure virtualization solutions—VMware virtual
desktop technology.

99 out of the Fortune 100 companies use VMware virtualization technology to power their data centers, safeguard, against disasters, improve development life cycles and more efficiently manage desktop environments. VMware’s desktop virtualization leverages this robust virtualization technology to meet the unique demands of outsourcing business processes.

How are Indian companies adopting virtualisation technology?

Undoubtedly, the potential of virtualization in the India growth story is huge. Virtualization will become mainstream in 2008 as it gains wide-scale adoption. Enterprises across segments like IT/ITeS in India have been early adopters of consolidation and virtualization. In addition to benefits like ease of management and better resource utilization, enterprises are increasingly becoming aware of additional benefits like design densities, power and cooling. Riding on the success of server virtualization, storage virtualization is also coming of age in India. The success stories of virtualization that have gained momentum are expected to have a positive impact on other segments like Manufacturing, BFSI and Aviation.

In India, many enterprises have already migrated to storage area networking for a flexible, lower cost, higher service level storage infrastructure. Currently, hundreds of enterprises are adopting server virtualization technologies that provide the same benefits for the rest of the IT infrastructure.

How enterprises should approach virtualisation -- the big bang approach or phased?

In most cases, I would recommend my customers a phased approach to virtualization. The adoption of virtualization technology within organizations typically follows a cycle of low-risk to mission-critical solutions, producing a corresponding low-value to high value return to organizations.

Most customers understand that Virtualization is a solution that will broaden across a continuum of their requirements like business continuity, resource management, and utility computing. Today most organizations adopting virtualization technology on a broad scale in India are still in the middle of consolidating the excessive server sprawl that took place over the past decade. Summing up up multiple physical servers onto a single consolidated server through virtualization enables cost and resource efficiencies, including a reduced consumption of physical floor space in a datacenter.

VMware's latest virtualisation products? What is the product roadmap lead?

We recently announced that our stand-alone ESXi hypervisor will be available at no cost to help companies of all sizes experience the benefits of virtualization. Since 2001, VMware's hypervisor is now used by more than 120,000 customers. 

ESXi is purpose-built for running virtual machines, minimizing configuration requirements and simplifying deployment.  Customers can go from installation to running virtual machines in minutes, particularly when downloading and installing a pre-configured virtual appliance.  There are over 800 virtual appliances that have been created for the VMware hypervisor on the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace, and ESXi now incorporates a direct integration with the Virtual Appliance Marketplace to allow users to immediately download and run virtual appliances.  This enables a new and radically streamlined approach to plug-and-play software delivery and installation

VMware also announced the general availability of VMware Lab Manager 3, providing even greater automation and control for IT lab environments.

As market adoption of virtual lab automation has grown, so has the need to support increasingly complex application environments as well as expanding, often diverse sets of users. For example, many organizations wish to establish global lab operations that encompass not only development and test teams, but also helpdesk operations, training organizations and sales teams that use the lab to recreate customer environments, provide hands-on labs or drive sales demos. IT administrators need to ensure consistent quality of service and access to appropriate lab resources based on a user’s role in the organization. VMware Lab Manager 3 supports multiple organizations of lab users with a single installation, whether users are local or distributed globally.

Because VMware Lab Manager also integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, both user management and resource administration can be centralized to further simplify lab administration and reduce overall resource consumption. This new release of VMware Lab Manager enables multiple teams and projects to effectively share a single global virtual lab