The True Cost/Benefit of Virtualization

It’s been an article of faith that virtualization will help save the enterprise money, turning it into one of the few growth areas of the coming year. But some folks are starting to take a hard look at the numbers and are concluding that the ROI on virtualization may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
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New reports from the 451 Group and others are suggesting that with much of the Fortune 500 set broadly virtualized, most of the capital and operating savings are already being realized, and additional investment in the technology will produce steadily diminishing returns.

Even in areas like desktop virtualization, actual savings might be illusory. Many organizations are eyeing VDI as a way to skip the hefty hardware requirements for Vista and Windows 7. But those would be examples of expenses that are avoided, not necessarily reduced from current levels.

As you move further down the enterprise food chain, the return from virtualization diminishes as well, to the point where it may end up costing you more than a straight physical infrastructure. This article on Computerworld runs through some of the numbers, concluding that introducing virtualization into farms of less than 20 servers is likely to be a bust.

How you use your virtual environment can also have major consequences on the bottom line. Unchecked virtual sprawl will most certainly eat away at any savings from consolidation, due to the increased need for management, storage and even physical servers to keep idle or underused virtual ones in play. (Yes, even an unused VM eats up processing power.)

For what it’s worth, some of the virtual-minded vendors have come out with ROI calculators aimed at helping you figure out exactly how their virtual platforms will work out. Microsoft turned to ROI specialists Alinean Inc. for its Integrated Virtualization ROI Tool, while Intel offers this system that helps determine the impact of virtualization using Xeon processors.

Financial considerations may be paramount for virtualization in the short term, but you have to remember that this is a long-term technological shift under consideration. Even if virtualization does not produce stellar ROI, or even ends up costing you money, it is still a worthy investment toward a more flexible, dynamic infrastructure.

It’s still too early to say what the ultimate benefits of cloud computing will be, but all indications are that they will be impressive. And you can’t get to the cloud unless you go virtual first.

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BY Arthur Cole - E-mail Arthur
Source：ITBUSINESSEDGE

Arthur has served as editor of numerous publications covering everything from audio/video production and distribution, multimedia and the Internet to video gaming.