This document is to know how virtualization can help our environment go green and how we can save on our costs.

1. Virtualization: A step towards Greener IT
Contents
1) Introduction 2
a) What is Virtualization?
b) The Green Footprints of Virtualization
2) Need for Virtualization and its Advantages 4
a) Why Virtualization?
b) Advantages
3) Challenges and Limitations 7
4) Return on Investment (ROI) 8
5) Conclusion 9
6) Annexure 10
I) Acronyms
II) List of Figures
III) References
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2. A server instance is no more a piece of HW consisting of CPU, RAM and
DISK but just a flat file! This is the POWER of virtualization.
INTRODUCTION
After many years of being viewed by many as a concern, environmental issues are now
front page news all over the world. Faced with increasingly urgent warnings about the
consequences of the projected rise in both energy demands and greenhouse gas
emissions, governments and businesses both are now focusing more interest than ever on
the need to improve energy efficiency.
With energy costs rising and information technology (IT) equipment stressing the power
and cooling infrastructure, many of us can see alarming economic and operational crisis.
Also disposal and recycling of computer waste( generally called E- waste) has become a
serious problem since the methods of disposal are very old and pose grave environmental
and health hazards. Companies today are being challenged to rethink their strategies,
adding energy efficiency to a list of critical operating parameters that already includes
serviceability, reliability and performance.
What is Virtualization??
Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such
as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources where the
framework divides the resource into one or more execution environments.
Fig1: Concept of Virtualization
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3. Imagine that a computer is an apple. In the old days, people would carry one apple in
their hand, until someone invented the basket. A bunch of apples could be put into one
basket. Those apples in the basket are still individual apples, but they are being carried in
one container. This is the essence of virtualization.
The Green Footprints of Virtualization:
Green IT refers to an attempt to reduce the impact of IT operations on the environment.
Green IT starts with manufacturers producing environmentally friendly products and
encouraging IT departments to consider more friendly options like virtualization, power
management and proper recycling habits. Green IT projects may have other benefits also
however they are generally geared towards showing considerable enhancement in energy
efficiency.
Fig2: Footprints of Virtualization
Virtualization can be a wonderful ally in our efforts to implement Green IT. Servers use
energy and give off heat irrespective whether 100 % or 15% utilized. Virtualization is a
technology designed to enable multiple application work-loads each having an
independent computing environment to run on a single machine. This eliminates the
approach of dedicating a single workload to a single server a practice that yields low
utilization rates and allows virtualized servers to function near maximum capacity.
With virtualization, you can consolidate the workloads currently running on a multiple
underutilized servers onto fewer, more efficient servers and begin to realize possible
savings and efficiencies that have been difficult to achieve previously.
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4. Need and Advantages of Virtualization
.
Why Virtualization??
The major reasons why organizations are looking towards virtualization are as
follows
Cost of Space, power and cooling is increasing day by day
Underutilization of HW capacity of servers
Administration overhead of large numbers of discrete HW boxes
Long cycles of Server provisioning
High cost of building HA for each and every server
Long cycles of server restoration processes
ADVANTAGES
Operational Benefits
• Increased Utilization of servers: It is achieved by having less numbers of servers and
better manageability.
• Save on admin time and energy: Virtual Machines are easy to maintain and support.
• Give “legacy” applications a new life: The new HW does not support legacy OS (like
NT). Using virtualization, one can move old operating systems and applications to the
new HW keeping all the configurations intact.
• Reduction of dependency H&E : In the case of large numbers of discrete servers, one
would need enough H&E resources in the case of physical intervention. If all of these
servers are virtualized the need of H&E drops substantially.
Virtualization is best suited in the remote infrastructure management model. !!!
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5. • Great Scalability: Hardware up-gradation on virtual server is just a click away e.g.
CPU, RAM and Disk expansion,
• Centralized command and control of Server and Applications: We can have a
centralized control of all the virtual servers from a management console.
• Data Mobility Eases Recovery: Virtualization also enables data mobility. The virtual
machine is simply a file that can be replicated from one data center to another, making it
easy to
a/ migrate applications.
b/ Server and data restoration
c/ building DRP and HA
• Fast Provisioning: The creation of VM by a click will help in more flexible
development and testing environments, which is one of the biggest operational
benefits.
Business Benefits
• Save on hardware: With virtualization, we’re able to reduce computers by a 8:1 ratio
which is a 75% reduction in physical machines.
• Save on space: Many Virtualized servers can be placed on one Physical Hardware
thereby saving valuable space.
• Increase uptime: The server can be brought up in case of disaster or hardware failure
with minimal downtime or even no downtime saving any business losses from being
down.
• Save on Energy costs: As there will be lesser physical servers, power consumption will
be much lower and thereby saving costs on power.
• Leveraging staff resources: Use of management software helps increase the proportion
of staff time used for productive work and thus increasing business value.
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6. Environmental Benefits
• Reduced Power Consumption: 50% to 75% reduction in electricity requirements.
•Lesser Consumption of Metals: Due to less manufacturing of physical servers, 75%
reduction in metals such as aluminum, steel, gold, copper and tantalum.
• Reduction in Toxic Materials: 75% reduction in plastics, including toxic plastics like
PVC which are used during manufacturing process.
• Declined use of harmful chemicals: 75% reduction in hazardous or carcinogenic
chemicals used in the manufacturing process
• Cut Down in heat and harmful gases: Due to reduction in air-conditioner
requirements there was also lesser emission of -
• Decrease in E-Waste: 75% reduction in the volume of materials going into garbage
dumps or recycling programs.
CHALLENGES
. Virtualization software and the associated systems management tools that enable an
advanced virtualization deployment certainly face challenges such as the following:
 Support: Not all OS and application vendors are fully supporting virtualization.
virtualization approach/platform).
The mitigation is that one should thoroughly test all the applications before
moving to virtualization.
 Cultural Resistance: Application owners are still living in the old quot;one
application, one boxquot; regime.
 Understanding of Cost Benefit Relationship: People are not yet able to
understand that how this is going to save costs and by what percentage.
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7.  Inadequate skills/Training Issues: Still companies are facing issues in finding
people with right skills and training costs are too high to train employees.
LIMITATIONS
Virtualization technology opens the data center to new possibilities that may provide cost
savings and new types of functionality, but virtualization does have its own limits.
Some of them are as below.
 Server virtualization only pools resources within one physical server; it cannot
currently pool resources between many physical servers.
 Some applications which are highly performance-sensitive, such as databases, data
warehousing applications or some with high disk I/O are not suited for virtual
environments.
 Virtualization technology does not support graphics-intensive applications very well at
this time.
Return on Investment
Most IT managers are eager towards virtualization but they’re still wrestling with cost of
ownership and ROI issues. With all virtualization solutions, there will be an upfront cost.
With some solutions, especially those that require high end iSCSI or Fibre Channel SAN
storage, the upfront cost can be substantial. Thus, obtaining the best return on your
virtualization is important for validating the purchase.
While the initial cost of virtualization is generally higher than conventional IT products
and services, the efficiencies that come with it pay for themselves in the long run. With
virtualization, following cost reduction can be achieved.
Hardware cost reductions: 30-75 percent
Operations cost reductions: 70-80 percent
Overall cost reductions: 30-60 percent
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8. Fig3: Comparing Total Annual Costs
Source: IDC’s Business Value of Virtualization Research, 2008
The above figure compares the annual cost of operations for a server configuration that is
deployed in an un-virtualized mode with the annual cost of operations for basic
virtualization (without features like HA and DRS) and advanced virtualization scenarios.
In a recent ROI survey, nearly 300 CIOs who responded to the survey shared about their
experience about the ROI. As we can see in the pie chart, around 85 % are pretty satisfied
with the ROI.
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9. Not sure
8%
Not at all satisfied
2%
Not very satisfied Very satisfied
6% 37%
Satisfied
47%
Fig4: ROI Survey
SOURCE: CIO Research
With benefits of this magnitude, it is little wonder that server virtualization technologies
are expected to be widely adopted over the next few years.
Conclusion
Virtualization delivers great business value today, increasing by improving
availability of servers, enabling application scalability, and reducing costs across
the board.
As governments and corporations intensify their focus on reducing energy
demands and greenhouse gas emissions, pressure to improve data center
energy efficiency will continue to grow. Organizations today should move to
adopt such a next-generation solution. These technologies can lower costs
directly through an immediate reduction of power and cooling costs and
subsequently deliver a long-term benefit through lower administrative costs that
continue to benefit IT organizations and their parent companies year after year.
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10. Acronyms
VM: Virtual Machine
ISV: Independent Software Vendor
ROI: Return on Investment
TCO: Total Cost of Ownership
P2V: Physical to Virtual
List of Figures
Fig1: Concept of Virtualization
Fig2: Footprints of Virtualization
Fig3: Comparing Total Annual Costs
Fig4: ROI Survey
References:
1) Virtualization Improves Business Continuity- A study by Data Synapse
2) Optimizing IT- A study by IBM
3) http://servervirtualization.blogs.techtarget.com
4) http://www.cio.com
5) http://greenittools.com
6) http://idc.com
7) http://dqindia.ciol.com/content/GreenIT/default.asp
Author
Neelabh Srivastava
neelabh100@yahoo.com
Sr. Systems Engineer
BE (Electronics) & MBA (Operation)
MCSA, MCSE, CCNA
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