The Console's Greatest Hits
Welcome to the new home of The Console, the blog from VMware Management. (From our first post: "Just as the service console is the dashboard for VMware ESX Server, think of this blog, 'The Console', as your dashboard for understanding how VMware is driving the virtualization revolution.")
In case you're just stopping by for the first time, here are a few of the Console's Greatest Hits:
Open Virtual Machine Disk Formats and Licensing
One highly related area we are concerned about is that we’ve seen Microsoft beginning to put restrictive terms on the use of published VHDs. Specifically, it seems that Microsoft is starting to restrict use of their VHDs to MS Virtual Server and Virtual PC only. In contrast, there are over 300 VMDK-based virtual appliances available on VMware Technology Network (ranging from Oracle databases to CRM packages to firewalls to email security solutions) that are freely usable by all regardless of platform or product.
Power and cooling savings with VMware Infrastructure
One of the mainstay use cases of virtualization – server consolidation and containment – allows customers to “squeeze” multiple workloads on the same server. There is a flow through effect from needing fewer physical servers – it means that VMware customers need less space in the datacenter, and less electricity and cooling. We estimate conservatively that for every workload moved from a physical to virtual environment, customers can save about $290 in electricity costs, and about $360 a year in cooling costs. The more important thing is that these savings accrue year after year. For example, VMware customer Provident Bank reports cutting power consumption by 13,000 watts.
On Benchmarking Virtual Infrastructure
As virtualization becomes commonplace in the industry there is increasing interest in measuring the performance of virtualized platforms. Plenty of benchmarks exist to measure the performance of physical systems, but they fail to capture essential aspects of virtual infrastructure performance. We need a common workload and methodology for virtualized systems so that benchmark results can be compared across different platforms.
