One of the more popular technology today is virtualization, and especially with the increase of power, it becomes even more so. Virtualization is a software that allows you to work with the computer to make it appear or work like it is several computers or servers, when in fact, it can only be one.
For instance, if you buy one big Unix server. You need to develop applications for it, so naturally you don’t want that the development of new applications will be together with the actual system that the office will use, but it is too expensive to buy 2 servers. So you slice the server so that you have a test server and a production used server, when in fact there is only one server. The magic of software makes it into 2 separate servers, so that even if there are numerous errors in the test server software, it will not affect the actual production server.
Since you have servers now that are dual or quad core ( which actually has 4 chips), then you really have many servers that are very much underutilized. Many IT departments now are consolidating their servers so that they will save more. For instance, we see a good number of companies who have over 30 or 40 servers that they have accumulated over the years. Many of them are even still Pentium machines. If they want, they can upgrade it to no more than 5 virtual servers. Then they can easily save well over a hundred thousand pesos a month easily in power, cooling, and administration costs.
Virtual software are starting to sprout up, and what is exciting is that Microsoft is bundling a virtual server called Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 so now, that makes virtualization now even much more affordable.
However, while I extol the virtues of virtualization, I also see many companies who get into virtualization for the wrong reasons – and mostly their reason is to be able to save on software license cost.That is sometimes a wrong myth that is perpetuated.
Please note that for most of softwares, they are aware of these virtualization and other technologies, and have noted in their licensing terms. As according to Christopher Voce of Forrester’s, it is very simple – ” for most licenses, you need to buy one for every person that you are benefitting from, whether it is running on a virtual or physical machine. You cannot engineer your way around licensing requirements. Most companies are aware and have made provisions that you cannot use technology as a way to cut corners around licensing.”
However, it is not foolproof but one way to really save on licensing is to study the licensing costs. But one of the ways I found is to look at software that is licensed per processor. If they are licensed per processor, then the various virtual machines running on top of the servers may probably not need to be licensed individually.
Meanwhile, I am studying a report that says the worldwide server market grew only 3.5 percent year on year in terms of revenue, but overall shipment of servers topped more than 2 million, which in unit accounts, actually increased 7.8 percent. The market for servers was $13 billion for the first quarter.
The two IT giants, HP and IBM, finished the first quarter of 2008 in a statistical dead heat when it comes to calculating worldwide server revenue and market share, according to a May 27 analysis from IDC.
For the quarter, HP’s worldwide server revenue was $3.77 billion vs IBM’s $3.65 billion. Third was Dell with $1.6 billion, and fourth was Sun Microsystems which totaled $1.4 billion.
In the first quarter, revenue from Microsoft Windows-based servers increased 4.2 percent to a total of $5.1 billion, while Linux server revenue increased 8.4 percent to $1.8 billion. Revenue from Unix servers declined less than one percent but totaled about $4 billion in revenues.