While new servers with multi-core processors and higher memory capacities enable enterprises to run more virtual machines per host, companies often do have servers that may be good candidates for redeployment. The article entitled As IT budgets decline, old servers called to virtualization duty offers great insight on this topic (thank you Rich for referencing this article and for sharing your point of view).
To determine if a server is a good candidate for redeployment the following questions must be answered:
- Is the server under warranty and how soon will its warranty expire?
- How many processors are installed on the server?
- What is the maximum number of processors supported?
- Do processors have virtualization extensions?
- Are the processors 64-bit?
- How much physical memory does the server have?
- What is the maximum amount of memory supported by the server?
- Is the server running a workload that can run in a virtual machine or possibly on a less powerful machine?
Lanamark Suite enables solution providers to answer these questions about each server in the data center and build much more cost-effective virtualization solutions that combine existing and new hardware. Of course candidate servers must be checked against hardware compatibility lists of virtualization vendors but this is much simpler to do once the pool of redeployment candidates has been identified.
