The Business Tech Case for Virtual Servers

For example, consider implementation of Physical to Virtual server environment. Physical servers are generally equipped with two power supplies, two processors, RAM memory, and a set of spinning disk or, today, a set of spinning disk and another set of solid state disk. 

Virtual servers are software implementation of processors, RAM and disk housed on “Virtualization Hosts” - which are simply powerful servers.  Just as sets of 45 people can easily commute by bus, rather than in 45 cars, we can easily achieve a 10 to 1 reduction of servers; i.e. put 10 virtual machines on one physical machine.  This reduces the number of power supplies from 20 to 6 or in some cases 2. This cuts power usage dramatically. It also cuts air conditioning load. 

An ideal minimal virtualization infrastructure consists of 2 hosts and one disk array, 6 power supplies. Each host would contain half of the virtual machines, but be able to hold all the VMs in the event of a situation. The disk array would be shared between the hosts. 

A bare-bones implementation would be one host with local disk - 2 power supplies. 

Obviously there are hardware costs associated with a physical to virtual migration, but there would be hardware costs associated with any migration. And clearly, one powerful server and a disk array configured as a virtualization host is likely to cost less than 10 typical servers.  A bus may cost $200,000, but 45 cars at $31,252 (according to USA Today) each costs $1.4 Million.