When we are selling, designing and/or building a virtual infrastructure, we brag about consolidation ratios we can accomplish.
But what’s a consolidation ratio of 8 to 1 or 10 to 1? In this case a picture says more than a thousand words ……..
On the right a part of the servers we collected during a recent VMware implementation.
28 servers, 4 more are placed on the left (out of sight), 7 are stored on an alternate location and 7 will be decommissioned when the WAN issues are solved.
A grand total of 46 servers which do NOT need power, cooling, support contracts, space, etc.
But what has been deployed to replace all 46 servers?
- 4x Dell PowerEdge R805 servers with:
- 2 quad core CPUs;
- 64GB RAM;
- 12 network interfaces;
- 5x Cisco 3750 switches;
- 4x Dell EqualLogic iSCSI storage arrays.
This means a consolidation ratio of almost 12 to 1.
Those 4 ESX hosts are now hosting between 32 and 40 virtual machines, 11 of which are terminal servers.