Server Virtualization: How We Cut Our Server and Network Energy Consumption by 90%

Posted by TJ Downes at 12:30 PM
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We feel it is our responsibility to educate our staff and clients on things they can do to have a lower impact on our environment. We try to keep our use of paper to an absolute minimum; our invoicing is done electronically, the majority of our bills are received and paid electronically. We make an effort to shut off all lights and unused devices before leaving the office. I personally, am trying to make an effort to use mass transit on a daily basis. I will admit that as a business owner this latter effort has not been easy and I see I am going to have to force myself into this habit.

Over the last year a major concern to me is how much energy our company uses. Primarily, I see the computers and electronic devices we operate as being the largest problem when it comes to energy conservation. In addition to the energy these devices themselves produce, we require much more energy in the summer to cool the environments these devices live in.

I have spent a considerable amount of time researching the best ways for Sanative to conserve energy, particularly with our energy-hungry servers. At one point Sanative was operating 8 servers. These consisted of the following:

1. Active Directory domain controller with network services
2. Secondary domain controller with backup network services
3. Exchange Server
4. public email server for hosted clients
5. Web Server
6. Database server
7. Application server
8. Utility server (backups, antivirus, etc)

Over the past year we have reduced this to 5 servers. Primarily I accomplished this by consolidating services onto computers which were underutilized. I did find that performance has suffered, to a degree, for specific application. But, as a whole, I felt better reducing the energy we were consuming by 30%. I still felt I could do much better.

After considerable research and waiting for technology (and pricing) to catch up, I have finally decided to purchase a new server which would allow me to virtualize multiple servers onto a single machine. Until recently, this was a costly endeavor. However, we recently purchased a new server with the following specs:

• 2 x 2.5Ghz Quad Core CPUs
• 16GB RAM
• 1TB HDD storage (4x 250GB HDDs)

The total cost of this system is well under $3k, shipped, including taxes. Using this system, we are able to eliminate 3 of the current servers and gain more performance than we currently have. By using Windows Server 2008 with HyperV, we virtualize this server into 4 servers:

• Domain Controller with network services, application server
• Exchange 2007 Server with domain controller services, utilities
• Development web server
• Development database server

Each virtual server is a dual core 2.5Ghz server with 4GB RAM and 200GB storage, far surpassing current performance capabilities. The beauty of it all is that we will only be running a single server, consuming 75%  less power than we have historically consumed for operating the same services and applications!

Hosted email domains are being moved to Google Apps for Domains. We moved all of our production DNS to DNSMadeEasy. Our production web and database servers have already been moved to a managed host. In the near future we will also invest in converting these servers into virtualized systems.

We have also transitioned to utilizing energy efficient switches and routers. At the end of this project, we will have cut the energy consumption of our network and servers by approximately 90% in a period of one year. This is significant! The costs have been relatively low and easy to swallow. The most difficult and costly part of the entire project has and will be the migration of systems to the new boxes.

Although it is my guess that we will never realize cost a savings from this transition, we have the peace of mind that we are making less of a negative impact on our planet by taking these steps. I also feel it is important that we can learn how to make ourselves more energy efficient and pass that knowledge onto others. If you want to know more about our experience or want to pick our brain, feel free to drop us a note.