Virtualization just starts to improve server utilization.

Do you get all the expected cost savings from your virtualized server project? By reading the following, you may be amazed at how efficient your data center can be with a series of regulatory measures.

After spending a lot of money on consolidating your data centers through server virtualization, will you be furious if you find that the corresponding operating costs have not shrunk as expected?

Let's be prepared to analyze a large, dark and absurd implementation of the virtualization Project statistics.

According to David Cappuccio, a Gartner analyst, only about 25% of Virtual server processing performance can be leveraged by businesses that deploy virtualized projects. "Almost half of our respondents are facing this kind of situation," he said. In fact, the utilization numbers should be higher, that is to say, 55% to 60%, so that the operation of virtualized applications really brings economic benefits, Cappuccio says.

The difference between the actual efficiency and the expected efficiency is mainly from the idea of virtual management of the enterprise. They tend to be more willing to acquire new virtual servers than to configure more workloads on existing virtual servers. And this approach, Cappuccio said, will cause huge waste on the economic level.

Why? Because a set of physical servers, even if only 25% of the processing power is functioning, its energy consumption rate will still reach its rated operating power 80%,cappuccio said. If we increase the utilization of its processing capacity by one-fold, to 55% to 60% as mentioned above, the energy-consumption boost it brings is relatively insignificant-about 85% of the rated operating power. This means that companies are reaping a lot of processing power, with only a fraction of the cost of energy consumed. And the practice of improving execution efficiency is one of the major reasons we were keen on introducing virtualization technology.

"Don't be obsessed with how much of your server's resources are being used for virtualization," he said. Instead, we need to focus on the utilization of resources. Many companies are happy to claim that the virtual scale of server resources within their data centers has reached 70% or 80%, but when it comes to the actual average operating level of its servers, the results are still appalling-only about 25% to 30%. This means that the overall virtualization of the system, even if done well, in fact, most enterprises are still wasting resources. To make your energy value per kilowatt, increase the computing efficiency of your equipment to 55% to 60% is the right path. ”

As a common and typical example, the above situation exists widely in the enterprises which indulge in their own virtualization schemes.

"You can also fully mobilize more server performance," Cappuccio said. At the same time, by running more application entities on fewer physical servers, we can conserve our data center footprint, which is a good way to cut spending.

Here, we can not help but ask: why not the hardware utilization is higher, but only limited to 55% to 60%? The reason, says Cappuccio, is that we need some performance space to cope with peak daily resource spikes, and the hard demand for this kind of buffer pressure still exists even when we enforce the workload cap to 60% utilization, he said.

But why has the low utilization rate not been effectively taken seriously in the world?

One of the reasons is the historical ills of the IT industry. In the past, because distributed computing was implemented by a relatively small number of computers, most data center administrators tended to be reluctant to use these poorly performing devices and preferred to implement real business computing requirements through mainframes. So when a customer asks for an application to be added to a distributed system, it is often the idea of an administrator to add an extra device for processing. That's why a computer's unhealthy ethos of an application has become a mainstream model, says Cappuccio.

But too much hardware utilization can lead to new problems, he adds. In organizations that do not introduce virtualization technology, administrators often find that the actual utilization of their physical servers is only 7% to 12%,cappuccio according to the findings. "This is the starting point for consolidating the resource management system, because obviously we have to find ways to make these machines more efficient," he said. "The problem today is that we find computers in virtual environments that are still running at a poor 25%." It's a little bit better than it used to be, but it's far from our goal. ”

By effectively exploring all the potential performance of existing servers, companies can save a lot of investment in the long run and cappuccio make judgments. "For the most part, increasing utilization can avoid unnecessary data center expansion programs and help users save money over a long period of time from all angles." ”

Such analysts are accustomed to the conclusion that many companies have not really paid attention to the blind spot.

"In the past, companies were always letting their rented mainframes run at a 90% performance load, because the cost of using such devices is really not low," he said. "Companies want to be able to do their best." ”

I was surprised when I talked about these trends and figures with Cappuccio. I would bet that most of the readers would have reacted the same way as I did when they read the statistics and were eager to know what level of their virtual environment was running.

In fact, I suggest that you put your ideas into action as soon as possible. Do you plan to get involved immediately and figure out where your data center is in the server utilization area? If everyone's virtual server resources are not fully utilized, it means that your data center also has a lot of meaningless work to do for the maintenance staff while you're paying for it with a huge amount of spendthrift. Of course, the power of waste and space is also a factor to ponder.

In this case, what will you decide?

If you haven't done so, immediately reorganize your virtual servers and list them.

Collect the necessary analysis reports, verify what is running on each server, and make a detailed assessment of the utilization of memory and processing capabilities. As a result, the operation of the data center is clearly presented.

If the actual utilization is low, you can start a survey immediately, such as making a targeted change, moving part of a virtualized application to another server to quickly improve operational efficiency, and so on.

The crux of inefficiencies, according to Cappuccio, is the fact that IT managers are bringing in modern management of data centers, hardware, and applications with their inherent habits of use over the years. This backward model is often difficult to completely eliminate in a short time.

However, with the evolution and development of enterprise IT, we can explore new ways and gain new insights, which leads to unexpected major innovations in the process of guiding practice. The beauty of this change will provide real economic rewards to companies as long as they are at the forefront of the IT industry and focus on lessons from all sides.

Don't waste this summer-think hard about the benefits of improving virtualization utilization:

Save money for businesses, increase productivity, reduce staff workloads, and find more insights that can help improve efficiency from their own IT systems.

In the progress of this kind of virtualization project, actually has nothing to do with the virtualization itself.