When it comes to protestations of too-high entry costs for server virtualization, Gerod Carfantan of VMware is a skeptic. He decided to develop a spreadsheet to find out what the virtualization breakeven point is, in terms of a minimum number of servers required for financial breakeven of virtualization, relative to traditional, physical servers.

Carfantan's governing assumptions include the following points, which are reflected in the spreadsheet:

• "Costs are a 3-year TCO, including server hardware, shared storage (where applicable), VMware ESX host software, and respective 3-year 24x7 support and subscription
• No discounts applied to hardware or software (discounts are generally better for software, which would improve breakeven point for virtualization
• The average cost per kWh of input power is $0.10 (power) plus $0.12 (cooling), but can be adjusted based upon location (the model contains data for all 50 US states, plus various European countries
• Costs are calculated with and without energy cost savings
• 'Soft' dollar savings in the form of management and refresh costs are excluded"

The findings Carfantan presents are that, without High Availability, the breakeven point is two servers; with two hosts, some basic replication and manual restart of VMs, the breakeven point is 4 VMs; with two hosts, entry-level shared storage, and VMware HA, the breakeven point is 5 VMs.

His full analysis includes a detailed Bill of Materials, energy costs, and cost-per-VM detail for each option. [...read more...]

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