Cutting Costs with Virtualization

The most frequently discussed virtualization benefits relate to servers.  By virtualizing servers, you can address the problems with underutilized and difficult-to-manage hardware, excessive power consumption, and the expensive space required to house servers in datacenters and branch offices. This leads to tremendous savings in several areas. The first and most visible is from direct server consolidation.

For organizations that seek cost-effective operations, the benefits of virtualization are more evident than ever. Microsoft Hyper-V technology allows consolidation of workloads that are currently spread across multiple underutilized servers onto a smaller number of servers. This capability provides you with a way to reduce costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead while creating a  more dynamic IT infrastructure.

Server Consolidation Savings

By running multiple virtual machines on fewer physical servers, Microsoft customers are drastically cutting hardware requirements and easing server management.

Electrical Power Savings

Many customers have realized similarly dramatic electrical savings, as a result of server consolidation, which is a particularly important benefit in today’s climate of volatile power prices.

Environmental Impact and Savings

Server virtualization can have a tremendous impact on green initiatives. By improving capacity utilization by consolidating underutilized servers, server virtualization not only lessens cooling requirements and kilowatts of power used, it reduces the environmental footprint for organizations.

Microsoft’s measurements with Hyper-V show a near one-to-one energy savings for each server consolidated.  In other words, the power consumption of the host OS does not substantially increase as guests are added. 

To put these savings into perspective, consider these actual measurements, which highlight the power consumption of 10 IIS Web servers compared to that of 10 IIS Virtual Servers running on Hyper-V.

Server Setup	Avg. Watts	kWh/year	Energy Cost	kg of CO2
10x Physical Web Server	5001	43839	$4007	34084
1x Hyper-V Server with 10 VMs	512	4490	$410	3491
Savings	4489	39349	$3597	30593

Space Savings

Server farms can be expensive to house. But consolidating servers through virtualization can save valuable space in your datacenter and branch offices, and further reduce operational costs.