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Improve Technology Infrastructure
The whole crux of this book is revealing the energy hogs in your organization and showing
how you can make changes so that those systems and processes are less piggish. This
section takes the IT issues we’ve already talked about and shows you how you can put
them into practice in your organization.

Reduce PCs and Servers
A big undertaking—in the scope of the project, as well as your ultimate payoff—is reducing
the sheer amount of computers and servers you have in your organization. The biggest
change comes by virtualizing your servers, but there are other opportunities to reduce the
amount of infrastructure you have in place. Let’s look at how you can cut back on the
humming boxes in your organization.
Virtualization
We can’t give a definitive answer for how many servers you can eliminate by virtualizing.
It’s a moving target. The ratio of server virtualization will vary based on how powerful the
original server is, how powerful the destination server is, the roles of your servers, how you
need your servers physically distributed, and so forth. Your best bet is to pilot your
consolidation, virtualizing servers onto a machine and checking the processor utilization to
make sure it doesn’t exceed the 50 to 80 percent mark.

NOTE We talked about virtualization and its merits in the preceding chapter.
As previously noted, several tools are available for virtualization. For the sake of
understanding how virtualization can be implemented, let’s take a look at the most popular
tool—VMware—and discuss how to install it on a server (or workstation). It doesn’t take
very long, and heck, you might be the very first CIO in your organization to have actually
installed one of the technologies you talk about in the boardroom. So go get a spare machine
from your desktop or server group (ask for one with plenty of memory), and give it a shot—
you may be surprised at what you learn.
Prerequisites
VMware Server runs only on Intel machines—Windows or Linux. Once you install VMware,
however, the operating system can be just about anything you want. VMware will use a lot
of RAM. You can control the amount of RAM that each virtual server uses, but a minimum of PART V
256MB per virtual server is required.
Be sure you allocate enough memory for each server. Don’t try to cram as many 256MB
servers as you can on your physical server, because you’ll experience sluggishness and
other problems. At the minimum, you want 1GB or 2GB per virtualized server.
Remember that disk space and CPU utilization are also affected by how many virtual
servers you have installed. Make sure you have enough CPU power and disk space to
accommodate your virtual servers.
Obtaining VMware
You can download VMware from the company’s website for a free 2-month evaluation.
After that you will have to pay for it, based on how many images you have deployed.