Save Money on Servers with Virtual Machines
When buying a new server, we have the task of choosing the components that will determine how the system is going to run and how reliable it’s going to be. For instance a video gamer needs to be sure to get a very robust video card for handling graphic intensive games. On the other hand, a server should be able to fun at least a Raid 1 (Mirroring) disk drive setup to protect the info stored on the drives.
With Virtual Machines, the story is a little bit different. With virtualization technologies you have much more control of the resources you can assign to your servers, the cap being how powerful and fast is your virtualization infrastructure.
Let’s say you have a very capable server that is being used as a directory server: probably its CPU and most of its memory is underused. On the other hand, sometimes you have a server that has many applications running at the same time eating all the processor and memory to the point that it’s performing poorly.
One of the things we need to change is the assumption that our virtual machines require the same amount of resources as if they were physical ones. Do you need 4 CPU cores on a server that has no applications written for multiple CPUs? Are you sure youreally need 4 GB memory to run those web applications running on Apache?
Enterprise Virtualization environments provide statistics and overviews on how our VM’s are actually doing. I recently put in a SQL Server environment from physical to virtual and the customers were really happy with how the new server and virtual machine was performing; it had more cores and double the RAM (8 in this case). They were baffled when I told them, “yes, you have multiple CPU cores and 8 GB of memory on that server, but I just gave it one core and two GB of RAM”. They asked me why aren’t we giving it more resources so it can run much faster? I then showed them the performance data on the VM and they were very surprised, the processor was not really doing anything and the memory usage was only about half.
Now the customer has more resources to create new virtual machines on the box that before could only fit just one. And it doesn’t stop there.
For example VMware ESX is capable of optimizing the memory usage when you are operating several virtual machines with the same OS (Windows Server 2008 R2 for instance) by sharing the same memory blocks. How? Multiple VM’s running the same operating system share a lot of the same instructions in memory because they share the same software, so instead of running and pulling up the same code into memory several times, it does it just once.
Using these kind of performance monitors you can better managehow your servers are going to perform, how much they really require and how many free resources you are going to have for future virtual machines.
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