We currently have 12 VMs running in our vSphere environment. We have virtualized 6 of our 9 physical servers and have already seen a good amount of energy reduction. We expect to add 3 more production VMs in addition to the final 3 P2V migrations. Which will double our server count while still reducing energy consumption.
Here is an email from my boss:
"I ran a quick LANSafe Report this morning and compared it to our load capture in November of 2009 before we started down the road of virtualization.
Our load on the UPS for each circuit was 38% on A and 39% on B.
Today our load is 26% on A and 30% on B which is about a 10% power savings and an extension of the UPS from 45 minutes to almost 1 hour and 15 minutes.
This is already a substantial savings and we have 3 of our major load servers yet to virtualize."
The three remaining servers are Lotus Domino, BES, and SQL boxes.
Before:
After:
We aren't utilizing DPM because we only have 2 hosts and that is a risk I'm not willing to take. Instead, I implemented Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling on our Intel Nehalem processors. @Kiwi_Si has a great walk-through and tutorial for setting up DVFS over at Tech-Head.co.uk.
So who says small businesses can't benefit from virtualization. I will post another update in the next few months after our 3 other heavily used, 2u servers are virtualized and the rack is cleaned up.