Measuring Impact of Virtualization on Data Center Energy Efficiency

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In several recently published articles a recent Forrester Green IT study has been referenced suggesting that the biggest opportunities to bring green IT into the conversation surround server virtualization in the data center. At Viridity Software, we are closely aligned with server virtualization.

Server virtualization technology has been in commercial production environments since the mainframe days. Contemporary server virtualization (over the past five years) has been driven by the explosive deployment of “industry standard” or x86 servers resulting in server sprawl. This coupled with VMware entering the market with technology that allows for multiple “virtual servers” to be configured on a single physical server has led to a major transformation in how IT equipment, x86 servers in particular, are deployed, configured and maintained in the data center.

Viridity EnergyCenter plays a key role in the x86 server virtualization ecosystem which include:

• Planning for Virtualization – Viridity EnergyCenter helps you identify consolidation candidates based on utilization & power consumption
• Designing for Virtualization – Viridity EnergyCenter helps you understand how “motion” (moving workloads from one server cluster to another) will impact utilization and consumption to avoid outages or wasted capacity. This allows you to increase density without creating power and cooling issues (referered to as “hot spots”.)
• Optimizing for Virtual Environments – Viridity EnergyCenter monitors utilization and power consumption at the virtual machine or “guest” level which helps you to understand the power implications of virtual machine sprawl.
• Measuring Virtualization Results – Viridity EnergyCenter will benchmark your data center utilization and power consumption performance before and after virtualization deployments at the device, rack, row or data center level.

As with all disruptive technologies, server virtualization offers tons of benefits. When it comes time to improve energy efficiency in the data center, server virtualization definitely plays a key role. But at the end of the day, the old cliché “You cannot improve what you cannot measure” requires an application to measure the before and after to truly quantify the reduction in consumption and realize the benefits.