The cost of a virtual infrastructure

Had dinner with one of my friends, Chris, we were talking about vmware, he works in a bank that’s going through vmware migrations and he said they’d found this problem.

Say I virtualize a DL380G4.  Now this bank depreciate their servers over 3 years, the server is two years old, who pays the depreciation?  The application team are saying, well you’re taking the box of us, you pay it, but then who owns the asset.  Can IT take this 380, and swap it for a Proliant 5000 to get rid of some legacy hardware?

Also there was some internal debate about costs. Buying and paying for a DL380G4 in the model above is easy, say it’s £6000 for the server including all the bits, the software, the memory, the disks etc, that’s £2000 a year (excluding support cost).  What is the cost of a virtual server?  They’re currently having an emotional conversation with an application team saying that their virtual server has 1 processor and 1GB RAM, therefore it should be cheaper than a server with n2 processors and 1.5gb RAM. But do we really want to go that granular with our charging?

Do we want IT to start having it’s own accountants specifically to take A DL585, work out its costs, split up those costs per virtual cpu, per virtual gb in ram and storage. Say a DL585 is £30k to keep the maths simple with SAN, that’s 10k a year divided by the number of virtual machines.

Yes some people are going to get upset along the way, but it’s the cost of doing business, say the application team save £19 a year in depreciation, it might take a months in man days at £400 a day to set up the cost per virtual machine procedures, processes, documentation and the agreed costs etc,

Besides what happens when I buy a DL585 with more memory, thus making the box more expensive? Doesn’t this lead to the cheapest and not the most resilient or appropriate configuration (in the grand scheme of things, we’re a bank). In which case would I not just keep buying DL360’s putting 2/3 virtual sessions on it, and be unable to properly facilitate scalability.

Anyway fun and games for Chris and his colleagues, until the decision is made and someone gives up some ground, it will be an ongoing point of emotion.

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