A Brave New (virtualized) World -- Cost Savings

What is the appeal of virtualization in IT today? Many enterprise business cases have been built around cost savings, and the analysts have fallen suit as well (one of the latest reports on virtualization cost savings recently coming out from Butler, noted in this article). Certainly the analysis looks compelling, but is the bigger opportunity being missed?

To date, most business case analysis in virtualization have been centered on virtual machines – that is only one aspect of virtualization, and cost savings with virtual machines is really focused on hardware savings. The general idea that I can take three under-utilized hardware servers and replace them with one larger hardware server running three or four virtual machine images does have merit – the cost of one larger server is usually less than three smaller servers, plus – and this was one of the main features that Butler pointed out – companies can save on space, energy, and cooling (which are especially critical where these resources are very scarce).

Is that the end of the story? Hardly.

In fact, you may have shifted some of your costs over to other areas. How is that possible? To start, you have not reduced software costs at all – in fact, you have probably increased OS license cost to boot. It is all too common to hear the tales of virtual machine sprawl – “I used to manage 200 hardware servers, and now I manage 500 virtual servers”. Ask yourself this question, how much easier is it to manage a virtual server compared to a hardware server? They each have an OS that needs patching and maintenance and even application testing and regression. The thing is, in heavily virtualized environments, there are typically more servers now to manage than there were before – this is an example of shifting hardware costs to software and human costs.

Machine virtualization has its place, to be sure, but there is another solution that prevents cost shifting and can even significantly reduce software and human costs – application virtualization. The genius in application virtualization is its capability to liberate the application from the infrastructure (or to liberate the infrastructure from the application, whichever way you prefer). This paradigm shift allows applications to be encapsulated with all of their dependencies, separate from any changes in the UOS made by the OS or even other applications. In the case of three smaller servers being consolidated into one larger server, application virtualization gives the control needed so that all of the applications from the smaller servers can be run on the one larger server, all sharing one OS. All of the environmental concerns and savings (space, energy, and cooling) have been addressed exactly the same as with virtual machines. However, server management and licenses have been significantly reduced and simplified – managing three servers has changed to managing one server. Plus, having all of the application dependencies encapsulated with the application, the application lifecycle and the infrastructure lifecycle have been simplified (little to no regression testing, much less maintenance) and now completely separate. This revolution is the real brave new world we are looking for.