Departmental acquisition and use of servers has expanded significantly in the last ten or more years. As a result, increasing amounts of less-than-optimal space has been allocated to house these systems. Building and maintaining suitable computer rooms or data center space is extremely expensive, and even more so when these efforts take the form of retrofitting rooms. Virtualization can provide a cost effective alternative to departmental computer room expansion while helping to minimize the overall campus facility footprint.

The cost for providing safe, clean and appropriate power and cooling to the Data Center and departmental computing spaces has risen significantly. The number of servers and associated power consumption in the Data Center alone has increased by 375%. Server Virtualization can help control these increasing costs.

IET is committed to implementing solutions that meet the established green computing goals set by the University. See http://sustainability.ucdavis.edu and http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/sustainability/ for more information.

A single physical server can host roughly 10 to 20 virtual servers. This translates into an 80% to 90% increase in efficiency resulting in an additional cost savings of space, power, and cooling requirements.

Adding new servers no longer involves the procurement of hardware. Instead, resources from the existing virtual server pool are allocated. Multiple servers can be created from the same image making it easier to maintain homogenous server pools and reducing the staffing time required to deploy a new service. It is estimated that server deployment time can be shortened to less than a day.

For heavily impacted virtualized services, new servers may be added or removed as needed. To avoid service degradation, virtualized services that experience periodic spikes in traffic/usage may be dynamically allocated.

Computing resources to improve service availability—such as RAM or disc space—may be added to virtualized applications without down time. In the event of a hardware failure, entire applications may be moved to other host systems easily and seamlessly. In addition, once a centrally-managed virtualization service reaches “critical mass,” there will be a significant reduction in the number of physical servers required. The reduction of physical servers provides additional saving through the elimination of expensive service contracts. Also, a centrally-managed virtualization service means only one or two spares need to be kept on site, thus reducing costs.

Virtualization also minimizes other hardware lifecycle concerns. As new server hardware, applications, and services are added to the host server pools, the older server hardware is retired. This process is without downtime and completely transparent. As a result, year-long hardware migration projects become unnecessary.

Virtualization clients no longer have to purchase equipment, wait for delivery, handle time-consuming installation processes, purchase and maintain hardware maintenance contracts, monitor inventory, and salvage or “bargain barn” equipment at the end of its useful life.

Many software vendors offer greatly reduced licensing costs for virtualized systems. Anti-virus companies such as Computer Associates have modified their licensing schemes to require licenses for only physical hosts, regardless of how many virtual systems they may contain. Others such as Symantec have begun offering discount bundles for virtualized systems. Virtualization can reduce backup licensing costs as well.

Microsoft Windows Data Center licensing allows all virtual servers contained on a single physical host to fall under the same license. Hosted departmental servers using a Windows operating system do not require additional cost for additional server operating system licenses.

Virtualization allows for easy collocation of images which results in quick service restoration in the event of a local or campus-wide outage or disaster. The campus is exploring an agreement with Indiana University for collocation of the campus’s main Web portal and a possible expansion to include additional virtualized services. IET could also offer to house virtual disaster recovery images for campus departments already using a virtualized environment.

Virtualization reduces the costs of maintaining duplicate development environments. Development servers may be created from production images with no downtime. These images are identical in every way, so they can be modified, tested and placed into production very quickly, speeding up development cycles.