“I’m bulding Skynet, and I’m going to take over the world” – Andy, andysworld.org.uk
We all need to tighten our belts, in these uncertain times, and as electricity costs continue to rise, and it’s predicted that electricity costs will triple over the next ten years, it’s time to start costing the electricity used by our IT equipment [again!]. Many years ago, we consolidated all the servers and workstations we use by using VMware ESX 1.0, this allowed us to consolidate 20 physical servers and workstations with three large HP ProLiants, at the time they were Intel Xeon 500MHz based ProLiant 3000R, 5500R, and 6500R, these were eventually replaced with three AMD Opteron DL385 and DL585, and MSA SANs. This has reduced our electricity costs, but not far enough. The DL385 uses approximately 600 watts just for the server, it has Dual Processors, and Dual Cores and uses 16GB RAM. With newer designs, some CPUs have become very low power. We currently use VMware vSphere 4.1 U1 to provide virtualisation for Domain Controllers, Microsoft Exchange Servers, Web Servers, SQL Servers, VMware View VDI 4.5/4.6, Firewall appliances, and other development servers. This is all Production, and then we have all the same servers in a Test and Developement Lab, in total approx 48 Virtual Servers, 20 Virtual Workstations of mixed versions from Windows 95, XP, Vista and Windows 7.
HP ProLiant DL385 Box
HP ProLiant DL385 Box
Enter the HP ProLiant Microserver – full load measured (40 watts). So I’ve purchase 5 to build a new vSphere 5.0 Cluster and using vSphere VSA (Virtual SAN Array). Total Wattage for Five MicroServers – 200 Watts! The wattage per virtual machine will be much lower, resulting in a much lower electricity bill.
Delivery of 5 HP ProLiant Microservers N36L
HP ProLiant Microserver N36L (dented box!) The server was fine!
The rumour is that the HP Cashback offer of £100, will be extended to 31 August 2011, it’s due to end on the 31 July 2011.
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