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GurdeepS
Asked: 2010-07-21 14:15:32 +0800 CST

Most relevant metrics to deduce whether server virtualisation project has been successful/saved money?

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As a virtual infrastucture admin, what metrics would you tend to be interested in to deduce whether a server virtualisation project rollout is successful/saving the company money? So whether it saves the company money over the purely physical approach, etc.

So the metrics need to be giving business information, as opposed to technical information (e.g. memory % used).

Thanks

virtualization monitoring

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I'm thinking ROI calculation, which is otherwise known as a cost benefit analysis. Off of the top of my head, here are some areas to consider...

    • Power savings
    • Server equipment savings
      • Need to consider big expensive server versus multiple small servers, often the ROI is minimal here.
    • License savings
    • Infrastructure savings
      • UPS
      • Cooling
      • Racks, switches, KVMs, cables, PDU, et cetera and so forth.
      • Lease/buildout, physical space cost
    • Time/people savings
      • Time for provisioning a new server
      • x less staff necessary for running y servers

    I recently had a cost benefit analysis performed on virtualization, which ended up being more expensive than my current infrastructure. Commodity servers and an Open Source software stack is difficult to beat on cost. Storage and licensing can be expensive for some virtualization solutions.

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  2. A good metric would be the number of physical machines you saved in the virtualization process, if you are providing 90 vms with 10 servers, you saved a lot of money in hardware by better using the available resources. Less machines also mean less energy cost, less space and cooling.

    Speed in setting up new servers can also be a good metric. How much time you used to took while creating a new server (unboxing, formatting, installing, etc...) and how much time it takes now.

    If you have migration strategies working, the time you take to bring servers back up after a hardware crash is also a factor.

    Those are some I can think about right now.

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