Shinya focused on techniques that would allow for successful operation of the endoscope by an individual, rejecting the common practice

It sounds like you guys did a great job planning accordingly for your virtualization roll-out. But I think my overall concerns still hold true: almost every one I talk to who is planning a major virtualization roll-out includes cost savings as one of their top 3 reasons, and I think that overall that’s a red herring. It’s not the cost savings “smoking gun” that people who jump right into it are thinking it’s going to be. It’s like saying that buying a house will always result in an IRS refund. Yes, buying a house definitely helps your taxable income, and can result in a refund where you may not have gotten one before, but it by itself won’t guarantee Uncle Sam sends you a check every year. A few cases in counterpoint to yours above:

OS Licenses: You’re not buying new ones, but you’re not getting money back by not using them. And in fact, most customers will continue to use their existing licenses either in newly virtualized staging/dev environments or hold them in reserve for provisioning new images tomorrow. They may spin down 50 licenses at first but those are still valid licenses they’ve paid for. The other main point is that it’s so easy to burn through virtual OS licenses that they may be so excited they have 50 new licenses that before they know it they’ve repurposed all of them for non-production systems and have to go buy more in an emergency.

Management: Sure, you can manage your guests w/o any change, and plugins do exist for basic hypervisor status info, but not for full-scale provisioning. Implementing VMware’s Virtual Center and VMotion costs money. You don’t need it, but most people go with it (or something of the like). If you’re building a complete virtual data center, you’ll need a management solution that knows how to manage the virtual components, not just a plugin.

So again, I love it that people are able to save money by implementing virtualization, when they plan accordingly, and I do think it should absolutely be part of the overall consolidation/green/efficiency planning. My biggest beef is that people all too often make a 1:1 relationship between virtualization and free money, and that just ain’t the case.

Thanks for the discussion…

-Alan

To give you a real world example of a project I ran:

Before: 80 physical Windows servers, 2 sys-admins

Project costs:
New Hardware Platforms - $90,000
Virtual Platform Licenses - $44,000
OS and Application Licenses - $0
Management - $0
Headcount - $0

After: 18 physical Windows server, 2 sys-admins

So for a one time investment of $134,000 we reduced our power footprint by 75%. To take that even further we would of had to replace at least 20 old servers anyway at a cost of $100,000 and we would of still had 80 physical servers with the same power consumption.

And to comment on some of your additional cost considerations:

New Hardware Platforms: In many cases you are replacing existing aging hardware to begin with, instead of buying new 1:1 replacements for your existing servers buy bigger servers that you can use to virtualize with. Replacing 12 smaller servers at a cost of $5,000 each with a single server for $25,000 just makes more sense.

Virtual Platform Licenses: Pretty much the price you pay to virtualize your servers. The virtualization market is becoming much more competitive and these costs will probably decrease as the non-VMware offerings become more polished. Competition is the best thing that has happened to virtualization, it keeps the dominant players on there toes and forces more aggressive pricing.

OS and Application Licenses: Most servers are under-utilized which is why they are great virtualization candidates. In most cases you should not need any additional licenses, if you do then you probably shouldn’t be virtualizing that server.

Management: For the most part you can use the same tools you used with your physical servers, you can also setup snmp alerts to forward to existing management software. Most management software vendors do offer virtualization specific modules these days.

Headcount: I’ve never really agreed with this one, typically virtualizing servers does not reduce the number of overall servers just the number of physical servers. So you still have the same number of servers to patch and maintain plus a few additional resulting from the host servers. Unless you have specific admins that only deal with hardware you will typically not reduce headcount.

If you add up all the costs versus all the cost savings over a 5 year period you will almost always end up saving money. Power savings is just one piece of that savings, energy prices are just going to keep increasing so power savings is a gift that keeps on giving. Obviously every environment is different and your mileage may vary but if virtualization was going to cost you money instead of saving you money there would not be many companies doing it.