On 2/3/07, Dennis Clarke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I broke this out of the GPLv3 discussion line ... lest it be lost in poor signal to noise level. ----------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------- Subject: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: Community participation (was GPLv3 ravings) From: "Bob Palowoda" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Sat, February 3, 2007 04:14 To: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Bob Palowoda wrote: > sorry about the snippage ... > The client was consolidating all their old windows > boxes on a couple of > 8 core Opteron boxes with VMWare ESX, so we just > built a Solaris virtual > machine and ran with that. Cop out, but pragmatic! I was recently asked by an organization with piles of users for ways to consolidate some server room resources. I suggested that piles of their 1U and 2U/PC gear could collapse into an 8-core Opterons with VMWare ESX server. That was when the costs arrived. And killed it. The cost of the VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise for 2 processors was over $5000 USD. That is just the license for the virtualization software. For only 2 procs. So double that for an 4-way Opteron is $10000 and then a Platinum support contract is about 20% of that per year. So add in $2000 a year per 4-way machine in a rack of five machines. So each machine gets slammed $10,000 for VMWare license one time cost and then the support is $2000 a year per machine per year forever! The cost of the server itself is in the zone of $16K with about 16GB of RAM and some fibre to the storage. We are at one time costs of $26K per machine and then a rack of them is $120K easily. Each rack will cost $12K a year every year for support costs.
Those numbers seem pretty correct, but you forgot to add in a few things. Space along with power and cooling are the biggest factors. Your 2RU better double it and have 4RU for redundancy ( two 2RU servers) , and this can easily replace 8 boxes even if they are only 1RU boxes have just reduced space by 1/2 though it does't sound like much at 8 boxes, but scale this up by a factor of 10, you have reduced 80RU to 40RU so you have removed a full rack, along with its ups backup power, and probably reduced cooling and power costs lets say that a 1RU rack server costs $50 a month to power and double that if you want power to have ups, at least as much to cool so replacing 8 boxes with 2 you have saved at least $400 a month that is $4800 a year. We can also remove 8 sockets of kvm as well so that is less power and maintenance as well. Okay were still loosing when you look at pure hardware costs now lets look at what happens on the software and admin side of things. With Vmware ESX, yes you are paying a fortune for it, but at least at windows you get a reduction IIRC you can buy one copy of Windows2k3 and run as many virtual copies of it as you like as long as you own the license for the size box it is running on, so you just reduced your licensing costs by a factor of 4 so that can easily add upto another $4000. If you want to compare Solaris you can reduced the number of cpu/support contracts from 8 (possibly 16) to 4, so your support contracts are reduced by 50% You can also deploy new instances of Windows/Solaris/Linux in a matter of seconds not hours as is typical, and you can script your changes/patches so its like maintaining 2 or 3 boxes instead of 8. A lot of application vendors are doing the same so you are also reducing the number of software licenses needed as well and removing just one high end oracle license covers the cost of vmware and support for 3 years 45,000 or so is what i remember it being. Next comes scaling and uptime you can move vhosts from vmware server to another as needed by work load and or system downtime this alone can save a sysadmin 100's of hours a year possibly. So if you look at this and decreased in administration time you can probably remove a sysadmin from payroll or run more servers with the current staff, and this can save you 80,000 in salary plus another 40,000 in benefits. So going through the savings so far we have, 4800 in power and cooling 4000 in OS licensing 48000 if you can reduce the number of oracle licenses you need by just 1. 120000 if you can just reduce one top sysadmin from the payroll I believe as you scale this up the hardware prices are less but even if you just say they are equal you are still saving loads of money even if the hardware as you can see there are still plenty of savings to go around. And if any of this keeps the company from building a new 2million dollar datacenter for another year, the saving makes the cost of vmware really small in comparison. here is a link about 2 guys using vmware in the trenches, they claim to save at least 50% of the costs by using vmware + sunrays and sun e4600 servers. http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2007/01/sun-ray-x4600-vmware-esx-stories-from.html James Dickens http://uadmin.blogspot.com The whole idea got thrown in the trash real quick becuase its just
a whole lot cheaper to pay for the power of all those 1U and 2U boxes that run doing 90% nothing all the time. Then we looked at Red Hat Enterprise AS4 top of the line at $2500 fee per machine. Platinum Support is $500 a year also. Then we need to add in VMware Server on top of that, lose the VMware cluster features in ESX and gain a new level of complexity with Red Hat Linux underneath VMWare Server. Plus support costs for VMWare Support. That was another idea looked at as a per rack cost and it got tossed in the trash as obscenely expensive as well as complex. Not to mention the whole "we are a Sun shop and we can't trust that" icky feel that came along with it. The last idea rolled out was the Sun Blade 8000 with 8 procs in it. Insane costs again. Personally, having looked at it, I think that virtualization is still a sham in terms of the costs. While it would be nice to run Linux in BrandZ zones as well as virtual Windows server sessions all on big huge Sun servers but it just can't be done. The virtual machine software for Solaris does not exist or won't be released from VMware any time soon. Sun has no solution to offer other than "migrate to Solaris" and then once you absorb those costs you pay for Sun support. I hope you hear a lot of frustration here. I was expecting some sort of holy virtualization angel to swoop down and whisper the solution in my ear but what really happened was another little demon that showed up asking for more money than you can imagine. The very idea of virtualization turned out to be a sham. There was no real solution for the corporate type user. While the Solaris Zone is very very *real* solution for multiple Solaris servers there seems to be no way to cost effectively virtualize Windows servers. Any solution that I could come up with was either a hack or a "that's not Fortune 500 supported" solution. anyone have any thoughts ? Dennis _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
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