Microsoft Pitches Virtualization Server 2008

If I hear the word virtualization one more time I think I might get sick to my stomach. However, I just witnessed a stunning demo of VS 2008 here in Redmond by Jeff Woolsey of the Server Virtualization team. If you think virtualization is still a fad, read on about how Microsoft's own internal IT department is using virtualization and saving millions. Jeff Woolsey cited an IDC analysis stating that 70% of IT budgets are going to pure infrastructure maintenance, with the remaining 30% going to new technology initiatives. That 30% is under attack by many CEO's, so the story MS is hearing over and over is that it???s ever more difficult to innovate and purchase the infrastructure needed to support new technology. And for the companies that have the budget, space and power in the data center is a major impediment to growth and innovation.

The answer? You guessed it, virtualization.

In production environments, MS IT has already achieved a consolidation ratio of 8 physical servers to 1 in its data centers. In its development and testing environments, which as you can imagine are expansive, the consolidation ratio is 16 to 1. But what does it really mean for data center managers who are sweating trying to figure out where to rack and how to UPS all those servers? It means going from a 32U rack footprint to 2U, it means going from 525 Amps of power used down to 8 Amps. Now I'm not an electrician, but that sounds like a pretty nice savings on your electric bill. Having problems cooling 32U of servers? That problem just went away too.

By the way, have you recently looked at the average CPU utilization across the servers in your enterprise? If it???s around 5-15%, then you are indeed, average. What that means is that many IT shops are actually underutilizing their hardware. Because IT shops tend to deploy servers in a role based fashion (i.e. DHCP, DNS, file and print servers), it not surprising that after a while, you find yourself with a million servers running independent, low overhead services.

When you consider all of these efficiencies in tandem, its really not too hard to believe that when multiplied across the tens of thousands of servers that the MS IT group manages, the savings can jump into the millions.Large scale adoption in the data center is still dependent on IT shops investing in the 64 bit hardware and software required to run VS well. However, with success stories like this getting out to the public, it won???t take long for IT shops to at least start playing with VS 2008.

There's a ton more to consider when deploying VS in production, but MS seems to have done a good job addressing those concerned with single point of failure and high availability in virtualized environments.

MUCH MUCH more to come on VS 2008.

- Randy George