VMware claims the virtual world is greener
Use less more
VMWARE RECKONS IT’S doing a grand old job of making the world a greener place, noting in a back-slapping press release that by using its vitualisation products, Vmware clients are slashing their C02 emissions, and cutting costs to boot.
Vmware virtualisation means punters can combine over 10 physical machines onto just one server, which reduces power consumption and therefore also cuts costs by a purported 80-90 per cent, the firm said.
It reckons moving from a 1:1 application-to-server ratio to 60:1 or more could result in millions of dollars in capital and operational savings over time. The company estimates that for every server a customer virtualises, they could be cutting 7,000 kilowatt hours (kWh), or approx. four tons of CO2 emissions, every year.
By its own calculations, Vmware says that by virtualising over 6 million servers since 1998, the firm claims 39 billion kWh of energy saved, or in monetary terms, that’s $4.4 billion. This would roughly equate to Denmark’s total yearly energy consumption or 11 per cent of Britain’s.
Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer of Vmware noted that most servers and desktops guzzled 70-80 per cent of their rated power, even when they were sitting idle, but added that “by powering down servers and desktops during inactive periods such as evenings or weekends, we can help customers save another 25 per cent or more on power consumption without affecting applications or users”. µ
Comments
six of one, half a dozen of the other
I'm not wanting to rubbish that, because I have nothing against virtualisation (though it doesn't always run different OSs to the host OS quite as nicely as they run when they're not virtual + it does tonnes of other stuff besides packing many separate servers on a 1U); but you do have to factor in hardware specs anyway if you intend to run virtual machines.If you take a computer/server of whatever hw, when you install the virtual OS you have to give it access to a certain amount of the hw (normally RAM and hdd space); the point being, your original hw spec is divided into however many virtual OSs you run.
So, in reality if you don't have a high spec hardware then your virtual OSs will run slower! Also all the servers need to share the same physical network link to the switch.
So unless you have gone and bought hw that is a higher spec than you actually need then it's only really reducing the space taken up by the hw, to run virtual machines.
If you have specced the hw to the work it is doing, then that's about the same level of green-ness as making use of your over-specced hw by running more than one OS at the same time per physical server.
But like I said, I'm not rubbishing it - for a start, it's a fine excuse to argue in favor of multiple core and socket CPUs and 10gig ethernet being required.