Datasheet

THE BUSINESS CASE
|
5
u
Consistent level of service
u Reduced operational costs
u Standardized management approach
Lower Costs
Virtualization helps drive down both CAPEX and OPEX costs. CAPEX cost savings can come in
the form of reduced expenses for the acquisition of hardware and the potential savings for data-
center real estate. OPEX costs stem from the reduction in power and cooling costs, management
costs, and the costs associated with server downtime or outage costs.
To assist you with developing your business case, Microsoft has made available a return on
investment (ROI) calculator that was developed independently by leading TCO/ROI experts
at Alinean (www.alinean.com). The ROI calculator exists as a sales enablement tool and was
designed to help quantify the TCO/ROI savings and competitive advantage of Microsoft’s inte-
grated virtualization solution. For more details on the Microsoft Integrated Virtualization ROI
Calculator, take a look at Chapter 4.
SERVER HARDWARE
Moving to a virtual environment can help you cut costs by reducing the number of physical
servers necessary to support your infrastructure. By consolidating your server hardware, you
will achieve higher utilization levels and thus reduce your overall hardware requirements.
POWER AND COOLING
Virtualization can help you take control of rapidly rising power and cooling costs. The sav-
ings typically stem from reductions in the number of physical servers in your environment.
Advances in both modern hardware and operating systems have parts to play. Microsoft intro-
duced the concept of core parking in Windows 2008 R2; core parking is the ability for the operat-
ing system to put cores of processors and entire processors into a low power state when not
in use.
Hyper-V R2 supports core parking by allowing virtual machine threads to be moved
between cores to enable core parking to happen.
SERVER PROVISIONING COSTS
Virtualization allows you to rapidly provision virtual machines in less time, which in turn
leads to reduced infrastructure management costs. Through the use of System Center Virtual
Machine Manager (SCVMM), the act of creating a new virtual machine can occur in one of three
ways:
u Creating virtual machines from a template
u Using an existing virtual machine (cloning)
u Using a blank virtual hard disk
c01.indd 5c01.indd 5 9/28/2010 1:42:05 PM9/28/2010 1:42:05 PM