you wrote:
I’m not sure if you have listened to any webinars on virtualization or the like, but virtualization is a pretty nifty concept. I personally think it is a good idea. We used to have 6 computers in our server room that users could remote into. Now we have one server virtually running multiple operating systems and programs simultaneously. One unit to replace six. It works great and is still running at only 20% capacity. So far, VM has been good to us.

my reply: Plenty of Webinars, seminarts, literature, and discussions have already taken place. i wanted to have real life experiences. Your experience is quite amazing as there is a report by gartner that says virtualization can bring down 40 to 60 % hardware resource usage down. but in your case it is quite hillarious. it seems your current server underwent for a major hardware upgradations otherwise to manage 6 servers in 1 is practically not at all possible knowing a fact that all six applications were runing on six different servers.

-jk

by dales:
does wonders for your carbon footprint and electric bills

my reply:
i know all this very well. wanted to know your real virtualization done!

by mrdenny
We use virtualization in our office for our office servers, dev and QA servers. We have three physical servers which are running about 70 virtual machines. As for the benefits we see: no hardware costs for virtual machines, no power costs for virtual machines, it takes 10 minutes to build a new fully patched server (using VMware templates), no physical rack space needed for virtual machines.

Assuming that were going to by $500 1U servers for each of our servers which we virtualized we would need almost 2 full racks of space, and $35000 in hardware. The 1 VMware server which we purchased was about $4000 for the hardware, and about $5000 for the VMware OS. The other two servers were machines which we already had but where very underutilized so we made them VMware servers as well for a cost of $5000 for VMware for both machines.

my reply:
That is great Denny and probably exactly i wanted to read. thnx.

Labnuke99
We built an entire test lab for our >2000 user Exchange migration project on a handful of servers. There were more than a dozen virtual servers built for this purpose (Exchange 2007 mailbox, CAS, OWA, ISA 2006, certificate services, etc.). We were able to test and check for any implementation issues prior to going live over one weekend. We also plan on using this same lab to test changes to the environment before putting them into production. This lab will also be used for patch testing. If a company is not investigating virtualization, then they are wasting money on equipment and operations.

my reply:
imagine these half a dozen servers occupying your rack space they would have occupied. now exactly how many machines you have saved is wonderful to know.
you have very well given the crux of the matter in one liner – “If a company is not investigating virtualization, then they are wasting money on equipment and operations.”

Is virtualization not an enhanced version of what we used to do earlier (or still being done by many), taking backup of one server on another, taking backup of one PC on another user PC and so on…so as to share resources, optimize the usage of resources, and cutting down the cost of separate mass storage media.