One of the biggest information technology buzzwords in 2012 was “virtualization.” It is the key technology behind the “cloud,” which turned out to be the other big buzzword. Most people have a pretty good grip on what “the cloud” is and what it can do for them. Virtualization, on the other hand, is a little fuzzier. In this month’s article we are going to take a look at what virtualization is, how it can help your organization and who the key players are in that market space.
So, you might ask yourself, “What is virtualization?” Well, it is an interesting concept in which we make the most use of the hardware we already have. Companies waste resources on a daily basis. You might have one computer that is using 100 percent of its central processing unit and random access memory. You might have a second computer that is mostly idle using only 8 percent of its CPU and RAM. Unfortunately, there is not a great way to share the unused resources of one computer with another. This is commonplace even in home networks. Virtualization attempts to solve this issue by allowing more than one system to share the same hardware. Think of it as carpooling for computers. This morning I, like many of you, drove to work in my car. My car can seat five people, but I was the only one in it. So I only utilized 20 percent of my car’s available capacity. Virtualization software allows you to do this with your computer hardware. For desktop machines it is not so practical, but when it comes to servers it is a Godsend. You can have a file server, email server and web server all sharing the same hardware. I used this technique at a financial institution and was able to reduce network from 260 servers to 80 servers. Less servers means less power consumption, reduced maintenance and lower administrative effort.
If this sounds like something you could benefit from, you should be sure to check out the major players in the market:
VMware – VMware is the 600-pound gorilla of virtualization. It has been releasing virtualization products for more than 10 years and is currently the market leader. You can find its products in use at almost all of the Fortune 500 companies. On a positive side, its performance is top notch and it offers more bells and whistles than any of its competitors. On a negative side, it is easily the most expensive to implement. A VMware implementation will easily have double the cost of the second place vendor. Its free product, VMware ESXi, is feature barren but is enough to get your feet wet. If you want full functionality, you will need to step up to the VMware vSphere suite, which runs between $4,000 and $5,000 per physical server.
Microsoft – Microsoft was a latecomer in the virtualization market. It had a few false starts with products like Virtual PC, but in 2008 it released Microsoft Hyper-V which provides excellent competition to VMware. Its free product, Microsoft HVS 2012, is pretty feature barren just like VMware. For full functionality you will need Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition. It carries a price tag between $1,500 and $2,300 per physical server which is considerably less than VMware. The major plus, however, is that Microsoft includes free licenses for the first four virtual machines on your system. This can work out to a pretty big cost savings. If you run Microsoft Windows on your virtual machines, the free licenses will more than cover the cost of the base server.
Citrix – Citrix is the most interesting vendor in the market. It has the smallest market share, but it has a great product. Its offering is called Citrix XenServer. The free version of XenServer is actually very feature rich. It is the only product in this list that includes clustering, live failover and multichannel SAN communications in the free product. In terms of value you can’t beat that. The negative side is that its free product does not include support; if you have a problem, you are on your own. Citrix makes its money through support contracts. To step up to a supported edition you will spend between $2,500 and $5,000 per physical server, which brings it in line with VMware.
So, there are plenty of choices out there. Whichever path you follow they all result in a lower total cost of ownership. That is really handy in a world where new technologies are constantly emerging, but new space in your budget isn’t.
