At work I am deploying a growing number of servers for both production use and development & testing. One of the things we are doing is paying more attention to replicating our production environment at every step of the development and deployment environments. That means allot more servers. How much is allot? We added 25% more gear enterprise wide in the month of August. We have been busy, and we are not yet done. I have filled one computer room at a facility and we are bringing online another at that location sooner than originally planned. We also moved into a larger cage at our data center earlier this summer. Then we added cabinets to the new cage to accommodate the larger growth. In yet another office we added a cabinet, and are working on beefing up the power in the room to accommodate yet more gear. Then we need to look at more HVAC. I never had to deal with ancillary issues such as not having enough power to run gear. 5 years ago I would never have thought I would be in a situation like this. It is very interesting to me to look at how many rack U’s a server takes up when quoting them out and determining what to buy based on the cost of a 2 vs 4U server and how much it would cost to just add another cabinet if you got the bigger gear. As a plain old engineer I would just recommend buy this server because it did the job. In my current position I need to look at the entire picture.
The next few months will bring another burst of server sprawl. One of the things we are looking at is the cost of buying hardware for every server role we need to fill, or the cost to do the same amount of computing power in virtual machines. I must sound like a broken record talking about one of my favorite software companies, VMWare. Our GSX server has served us well, and is a great proof of concept to show how we can expand the use of VM’s. I don’t think we will deploy VM’s en-mass at our data center to do production work, but we have plenty of other uses for the technology elsewhere that makes looking into GSX or ESX server a viable alternative to buying more gear.
To me it boils down to 2 factors. 1 is of course cost. How much does it cost us to buy and deploy a dozen servers, power them, get KVM’s, and rack space for them, vs purchasing hardware for a VM server (or 2) that can handle the same amount of work load.
The 2nd factor is ease of use. How quickly can we get build a physical server for use? Restore it from a preset level of configuration for use in dev and qa? How fast can we buy and deploy hardware when a need comes up for a new server? The same questions apply for virtual machines.
I am a bit biased. I want to virtual machines. The flexibility they give you is amazing. I also know that I have SLA’s to keep, and costs to consider. So if the per server (or server instance) costs are too high we can’t do it. For now I spoke with my boss late this week to identify what applications need homes in what environments. The next step is to crunch the numbers to get all of our options. The VMware user groups have been helpful in figuring out realistically how many VM’s you can get per GSX and ESX server. More news as the project unfolds.