Virtualization At What Price?

Before you start realizing the savings from virtualization, it's important to understand the cost associated. It's important to know how much money you'll have to shell out to deploy the technology, and then calculate the resultant savings. This will help you determine whether to go for virtualization or not. Any virtualization deployment can be broken up into the cost of hardware, the virtualization software itself, cost of licenses for the OSes and apps you'll be running on this platform as virtual machines, and the cost of service and support. There would also be the cost of management tools that would come in, which depends upon the level of management you'd like to do. These would also vary for different platforms.

Free or paid virtualization software

The good thing about virtualization is that there's both free and commercial platforms available. Which one to go for depends upon several things. One, if you have sufficient in-house technical expertise, then you could go for the freely available solutions. Two, you need to check whether the free solutions have any limitations. For instance, certain free virtualization platforms limit the maximum number of virtual machines you can set up on them. Another limitation could be the types of operating systems it supports. If it doesn't support the OS that you're using in your organization, then the virtualization software will be of no use for you.

The real cost of virtualization

Setting up virtualization is the easier part. The difficulty comes in managing the same. As you get used to virtualization, you'd be tempted to put more and more virtual machines on the server. Then you'd want to backup those virtual machines on a separate machine, and ensure their images always remain updated. You might also then want to have a failover machine setup, so that in case a virtual machine fails, there's a backup that takes over. You'll need tools to do all these functions, and the freely available ones may or may not have all these. Let us look at some the cost-related concerns that an organization may have to go through while thinking of virtualization.

Assessing the cost of hardware

The first question that comes to an enterprises before investing in virtualization is about the kind of hardware that would be required for virtualization, how much would it cost and what to do with the existing hardware. You could first check in house to see whether your existing servers could be used for virtualization, before deciding to buy new ones for the job. You'll also need to check whether the hardware itself is virtualization ready or not. In x86 servers for instance, the CPUs from Intel and AMD use technologies with built-in virtualization support. If these are not supported, then the platform may not be suitable for doing virtualization.

Let's look at the how your current computing platforms lying in your datacentre could be possibly used in the virtualization infrastructure and the new generation servers ideal for virtualization infrastructure.

32-bit Servers: If you are currently using 32-bit machines in your data centers, you could think of repurposing them for virtualization.Though the performance and reliablity of these machines would be good for one application, one server mode, but when talking about the number of virtual machines that could be installed per server and its functionality, you might not get great results. A 32-bit hardware would allow for only very limited expansion of important resources, like memory and card slots. Such hardware could be repurposed and used for low density virtualization, development, QA etc.

64-bit Servers: The 64-bit servers in your datacentres have greater memory and could support more number of virtual machines. But you'll need lots of memory to do virtualization. Having 4 GB or 8 GB may not be enough. So check whether there are sufficient memory slots to upgrade the memory on these servers. They could be repurposed and could be used for medium density virtualization, developement and QA.

New Generation Servers: The new generation servers are capable of supporting very high memory that range from 32 GB to 128 GB. They would also contain multiple card slots that can hold NICs and HBAs and they would be equipped with latest generation of processors that are virtualization enabled.

Cost of Software

Talking about the hypervisor products, let's look at what some top vendors have for enteprises.

VMware: VMware ESX and VMware ESXi are bare-metal hypervisor architectures, which install directly on top of a physical server and then partition into multiple virtual machines running simultaneously and sharing the same physical resource of the underlying server. These come with VMware vSphere which is a virtualization platform and future VMware vSphere would include only the VMware ESXi architecture.

The major difference between these two hypervisors resides in their architecture and operational management. VMware ESXi is a thin hypervisor that can be delivered as an embedded firmware in server systems from major OEM vendors or as an installable product that can be deployed by the customers in different environments. VMware vSphere Hypervisor based on VMware ESXi, the hypervisor architecture can be downloaded for free. This free edition of the vSphere production line is licensed to only unlock the hypervisor functionality of vSphere, but it can be seamlessly upgraded to more advanced offerings of VMware vSphere which are paid versions.

Microsoft: Microsoft Hyper-V is a hypervisor-based technology which is a key feature of Windows Server 2008 R2 which provides as a scalable virtualization platform. Hyper-V is available as two distinct version, one is the standalone product, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, available via the Microsoft Download Center free of charge.

It is also available as a part of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 which is said to be the next generation hypervisor-based server virtualization which is an integral feature of Windows Server 2008 R2.

The Windows Server 2008 R2 licensing model consists of server OS license and incremental Client Access Licenses (CALs). So essentially, you're not paying anything for Hyper-V. You're just paying for the OS and application licenses.

Citrix Xen: This is a server virtualization platform that uses the Xen hypervisor for virtualizing every server on which it is being installed. The free edition of XenServer starts with a 64-bit hypervisor and centralized management, live migration, and conversion tools to create a virtual platform. Further there are premium editions like advanced edition, enterprise edition and platinum edition which extend the platform to enable organizations of any size to integrate and automate management processes, delivering a virtual datacenter solution.

Other Costs involved

While going for a virtualization vendor, it is important for any enteprise to analyse the amount of technical support being provided during implementation of the virtualization solution. Also important is to understand how much would you have to shell out so as to acquire the necessary licenses. So it becomes important to understand a virtualization vendor's licensing model.

A common problem that enteprises face is that once a vendor provides a virtualization platform which might be really great but when it comes to management of the software, the enterprises hit dissapointment and end up shelling more time and money. So a fair amount of research about every vendor's management software for things like live migration, CPU management etc becomes equally important.

Virtualization TCO calculator

If your organization has not yet stepped into virtualization, then a good way to start off with is Web-based TCO Calculator that would enable easy estimation of ROI of virtualization and a detailed report of the potential cost savings. Some TCO calculators that you could use are, Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI Calculator and VMware ROI TCO calculator which would enable you to calculate the IT savings, business competetive cost savings, and ROI that an enteprise could generate using solutions from respective vendors.