To Virtualize or Not to Virtualize?

Back in 2005, Move.com was running about two servers for every employee. To be precise, to keep its bandwidth-hogging online real estate services business afloat, the 1,000-employee company operated more than 2,000 servers spread across two data centers—not a ratio most IT managers would envy.

So Move.com undertook a major server rationalization effort that hinged on virtualization, or dividing its servers to run many instances per box, thereby reducing its overall server footprint and associated costs.

Working with virtualization vendor VMware, Move.com was able to close one of its data centers and reduce its server pool by about half, down to 1,000 physical machines. “Half of our server footprint is maintained on just 150 servers,” says Kevin Johnson, senior manager of systems administration for Move Inc., based in Campbell, Calif.

The company has been able to save $45,000 thanks to server consolidation and virtualization. And while not exclusively attributed to virtualization, Move.com also saw a drop in monthly data center power costs in excess of 60 percent. (The lower utility costs between California and Arizona factored into the monthly power savings.)

For Move.com, the ROI of virtualization was undeniably sound. But there were bumps on the road. Five years ago even VMware did not have all that much experience with a major consolidation effort. “We found a lot of bugs with their system,” says Johnson. “We were fortunate that we did not have downtime because of it.”

For example, Johnson had to experiment to pinpoint exactly how many servers could be placed into a cluster of VMware servers. “We had clusters as large as 30 servers. That was too large. We had to break those up. It took us many months and years to clean that up.” At this point, Johnson is pleased with the virtualized servers’ performance, but he could have used some help getting here. Other than VMware, Move.com faced server virtualization without the aid of a trusted adviser.