Server sprawl is a common issue found in many businesses today due to our increasing reliance on Information Technology. It is caused by the tendency to install applications on separate physical machines in order to avoid conflict, which leads to a relatively low level of average CPU utilisation, often only 10-15%. Virtualisation is being used extensively to consolidate the physical servers created by “server sprawl” onto a much smaller physical footprint generating significant hardware, administration and power savings for many businesses throughout the world.

Virtualisation is achieved by an operating system called a Hypervisor, which is the first software that is installed onto a bare metal physical machine. The Hypervisor acts as a “host” operating system onto which multiple “guest” operating systems are subsequently installed. The job of the Hypervisor is to decouple the physical machine hardware from each of the “guest” operating systems in order that multiple virtual machines, called guest operating systems, can run in isolation, side-by-side on the same physical machine.

Each virtual machine has its own set of isolated virtual hardware services (e.g., RAM, CPU, NIC, etc.) which it sees as a consistent, normal set of hardware regardless of the actual physical hardware components. Because these physical hardware services are isolated by the Hypervisor, it can split them and share them with a second, third, fourth virtual server loaded onto the same physical server *.You can think of it as the Hypervisor fooling the guest operating systems into thinking that they are each running on their own dedicated physical server.

In fact as many as 10-15 virtual servers are often installed onto a single physical machine using modern 64bit dual core quad processor servers. Average CPU usage will be much higher - perhaps more like 60-70% - so much greater IT resource utilisation can be achieved.

Server consolidation savings alone are enough to generate a healthy return on investment for almost all virtualisation projects but, since virtual machines are encapsulated into files, making it possible to rapidly save, copy and provision a virtual machine, they present a whole set of extremely cost effective business continuity and disaster recovery possibilities. Full systems (fully configured applications, operating systems, BIOS and virtual hardware) can be moved, within seconds, from one physical server to another for zero-downtime maintenance and continuous workload consolidation.

Such business continuity options are again being adopted extremely rapidly by many businesses throughout the UK as well as in the wider global IT community.

Why EACS?

VMware ESX Server dominates the Hypervisor market and EACS has qualified VMware Sales and Technical engineers and consultants helping our customers achieve outstanding server consolidation and business continuity benefits using VMware ESX Server, as well as other VMware added values tools such as VMware VMotion and VMware High Availability (HA).

Using VMware, EACS can help you to reduce hardware and operating costs by as much as 50%, reduce hardware requirements by a 10:1 ratio or better, increase utilisation of existing hardware from 10-15% up to 80%, save more than £1500 per year for every server workload virtualised and reduce the time it takes to provision new servers by 50-70%.

For more information on Server Consolidation & Virtualisation contact us.