"VMWare is a Godsend"

I interviewed Monique Sendze of Johnson County Library for our third Cookbook last year and this excerpt stood out for me because I agree so strongly with her argument (virtualization can save you time and money) and because she makes the case so enthusiastically.  

I have over 80 servers and the whole virtualization technology is something that is really getting me excited. For the past two years I've been virtualizing like crazy, using VMWare on certified ESX.  I’ve cut down a lot of my server costs and computer room power. Because we got to a point where we maxed out our computer room and we couldn’t grow, we couldn’t go out to another building so what do I do? I started looking at virtualization. That's the technology that whatever they say that it does, it sure does it. I mean, for real. It does it. You actually see a return on investment almost instantly. When you start moving from 70 Cisco servers to 20, you can't beat that. You can’t beat the amount of money you save on the servers themselves, the time to maintain all of those servers and the cooling of the room. I can’t tell you exactly but I would say that it’s cut my electricity and cooling costs almost in half. And look at the benefit it has for disaster recovery; for example, if I've got a server that I need to work on, I just move it over to another machine and it continues running; then I'll work on this one and then I'll move the virtual machine over there and I bring it back when I'm done. It's like magic, you know.  High availability. They talk about high availability. That's it. VMWare is a godsend.

That’s a pretty strong endorsement -- 70 servers to 20 and a 50% reduction in electricity and cooling costs.  If you’d like to learn more about virtualization, check out TechSoup’s Virtualization 101.