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The Greening of IT
176 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

averse to the risk associated with shared resources in a virtual environment.
To reduce the original risk, the processor and storage resources of the virtual
images were oversized. After the virtual images were put into production,
several months of data were collected to establish a usage baseline and under-
stand the effects the load on the images peaking at different times. Tools
were written to analyze the data and determine which virtual images needed
more physical resources and which virtual images needed less physical
resources. The account approved the right sizing of the virtual images. This
was accomplished in a controlled fashion using contemporary change man-
agement processes, including back-out capability should something go
wrong.
Several 16-processor servers were freed up as a result of this rightsizing.
Some of these servers are being redeployed in that account for future require-
ments, and some of the servers are being given to the other accounts in that
data center. The redeployment to the other accounts in that data center dra-
matically improves server installation time, as the servers are already on site,
already installed, already accounted for in space, power, and cooling alloca-
tions, and already cabled into the network and disk storage.
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In the x86 environments, we performed a similar exercise. We leveraged a
virtualization technique that allowed us to nondisruptively move an image
from one physical server to another. We were previously using this function
to move the virtual images around to enable us to take physical servers down
for microcode updates. We can now use this function to move the virtual
images around to enable us to increase the physical server utilization.
Through this movement, we could also reduce the server utilization to zero
on several of the servers and position them for reuse.
Based on the success of the early adopter account, we started approaching
each of the other accounts to virtualize their environment. Although each of
the lines of business was receptive to virtualization, none were prepared to
take as aggressive an approach. Several of the lines of business had already
piloted virtualization on some of their workloads. We are currently working
with two of the lines of business to create a business case for virtualization in
their environment. We refined the business case template used for the
accounts from the experience we gained from the virtualization of more than
50,000 images that we had previously installed. As we have cost-justified
several virtualization projects already for those installations, we expect a pos-
itive return on investment with the business case. We will work with the
accounts to make sure that the investment funding and people are available
to execute the proposals.