One of the benefits of virtualization that customers don’t always talk about is how it can help you to clean up your closet.  Wiring closet that is (or wherever you rack your gear).  Virtualization enables server consolidation and that means fewer boxes that need to be cabled up, translating into a cleaner rack. 

Virtualization benefits go beyond cleaner racks, offering you: 

• Hardware cost savings – The more workloads you can fit on a server the fewer servers you have to buy and that means you can spend less and do more with your IT budget.  VMware customers can expect to reduce hardware requirements by a 10:1 ratio or better.

• Labor efficiency – Fewer servers to manage means you also save time on hardware management tasks.  This could be anything from racking, powering and configuring to daily management and upgrades.  We see customers reducing the time it takes to provision a new server by up to 70% as an example. 

• Improved Availability – The nature of virtualization makes it much easier to apply fault tolerance and high availability features consistently across your infrastructure to ensure that your applications are always up and running, even in the case of unplanned downtime caused by hardware or application failures.  The centralized management and automation capabilities in vSphere help you easily achieve your availability requirements.

Back to cleaning up your closet, our friends over at Spiceworks are running a contest looking for the best and worst closets with some great prizes. 

Follow this link to find out more:
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/202389-return-of-the-cable-closet-contest

We’d love to hear from you too.  Send us links to your before and after pictures and tell us how virtualization has helped you clean up your closet.  And if it has helped you save on hardware, made you more efficient or improved your application availability, we want to hear about that too.