David's Discussions

OK. I admit it. Some of the best ideas (and epiphanies) I bring to my customers don’t come from me, but instead come from other customers. Case in point, I was recently having a conversation with a long time customer of mine who has, over the years, become a good friend, so we routinely bounce ideas off one another to make sure our math works out and we are not falling prey to the continual “marketecture” produced by most manufacturers out there.

He has a midsize shop: somewhere between 50 to 100 machines, SAP, Exchange, and the rest of the usual suspect applications and platforms one would expect from a “current” IT shop. He has been planning his big move into VMware and, in his typical fashion, has done maniacal research on the hardware and the processes to do the job right for the right price. He is not one to cut corners. So, my cell rings…

"Why would I buy 8 core Intel processors over 12 core AMD processors?" I started rattling off the typical reasons along the lines of comparing the new cores to what he already has on the floor, potential performance differences between the cores themselves, recent market movements (good or bad) of the two companies, etc. The reality is that VMware posts the relative performance of most of these platforms, so the conversation was largely academic in the end, but a good exercise none the less.

But then I did the math. He was planning on buying 3 or 4 new machines to virtualize about 80% of his existing machines. Even if he bought two-way machines and three of them, that’s 72 cores! Since many of his machines are single processor, lower frequency, single core, computationally speaking, he potentially has more computational density in the 3 new machines (definitely if he goes with four new machines) than in the roughly 70 machines we are talking about virtualizing. While the RAM story may not be as straightforward, it seems like virtualization is now the only way to go to even remotely get your bang from your buck in the server space.

I appreciate the pessimists who will rattle off reasons such as application support from the software manufacturers, weird hardware requirements like license “dongles”, and… uh… OK, I can’t think of any other real reason. The reality is, the software companies are caving in every day to the masses demanding virtualized support.
So now onto the new challenges virtualization is bringing such as the required “sewer pipe” of network and storage connectivity—but that’s a conversation for another day.

Image courtesy of farleyj on Flickr via the Creative Commons