The lads over at the blog “Documenting a virtualization project” have finished.  In under 12 months they’ve consolidated 120 Virtual Machine on to 6 Hosts using VMWare ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2.  — this is a consolidation ratio of about 20:1

I know this is a bit off topic for my blog, but I personally find it still very relevant and interesting.

The guys are saving about $9,500 AUD per month in real estate cost/rental, (that’s $6000 EUD or $8,000 USD) — and roughly 30%  of that again per month in Power ($3000 AUD).

A huge thankyou Martijnl for his time and efforts, for publishing his “notes from the field” for such a brilliant resource.

You can read more about his project wrapup in his post “End score (consolidation, power etc.) « Documenting a virtualization project“, and a snippet is below:

Our current VI consists of:

  • Six cluster hosts (DL585 G2, 48GB memory per host) :: 120 Virtual Servers (consolidation 20:1)
  • 1 Virtual Center Management Server

Real estate saved:

  • Total rack units used for VI: 30
  • Total racks used for VI: 2
  • Total rack units saved: 240
  • Total racks saved: 8
  • Total sq. meters saved: 50 (we would have had to move into a datacenter suite twice as large to accomodate for growth)
  • Total real estate cost One Time Charge saved: € 30.000 (approx.) – 
  • Total real estate cost Monthly Recurring Charges saved:  € 6.000 (approx.)

There are also additional benefits like the massive increase in continuity, the time saved on provisioning new servers and the transparency in costs.

On a side note, Martijnl has rolled out VDI for 50 Desktops.  Rather than listen to all all the other site bagging/hyping up VDI, you read more about his experiences in his VDI posts:  Mumbai is connected, First connection and Operational and stable