I was on a road trip recently and had a number of discussions about consolidation ratios as a measure of success. This worried me. Especially considering that these were large virtual adopters and I was talking with these clients about moving their Tier 1 applications to their virtual platforms. It made me realize that a number of organizations are still using that ‘old’ ratio as a key performance indicator (KPI) for measuring how successful they are at virtualization.
Yes – back in the day consolidation ratios were a common measure often used for capacity management, generating ROI models and generally bragging rights. This was fine when the only services being migrated were “low hanging fruit” or “extremely” underutilized servers. One could expect 10:1, 25:1 even 50+:1 as a ratio.
But can we keep up those high ratios as we migrate Tier 1 services to virtual platforms?
Easy answer: No!
For the obvious reason that these larger workloads are actually using the hardware resources underneath them (being physical or virtual) so when we start to stack them side by side there are fewer resources to go around. But this is not a bad thing. A lower ratio does not mean you’ve failed. It seems an obvious message but one I wanted to re-iterate as some seem to miss it.
Lets make sure our vision and focus for virtualization goes deeper than consolidation. Don’t forget about the many other cool things virtualization brings like: DR enablement, unlocking multicore platforms, simpler management and capacity in the cloud.
Merry Christmas Everyone!
