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Whilst doubters remain, cynically citing vendor marketing spin, concerning the real impact that such things as virtualisation have on energy consumption and carbon footprints, companies such as Citrix do in fact provide undeniable and measurable improvements. Getting fewer servers to do the same job, using XenServer for example, is the fundament. Other products though, particularly within the Citrix portfolio, such as XenApp Platinum or Citrix Online, enable secure remote access and fuel-saving work-from-home environments and these also contribute substantially.

As most IT managers are now aware, server virtualisation vastly reduces the amount of servers required to service the environment. This impacts not only energy consumption in powering the actual devices, but also the considerable air conditioning required to keep the data-centres at optimum temperature.

Citrix incorporate a product called Provisioning Server into the Platinum version of their XenServer solution. Taking things to the extreme, this could provide another stepping stone towards the Holy Grail of using energy only when that energy is actually required.

Instead of having a fully functional data-centre running all day and all night, regardless of whether it’s actually in use or not, Provisioning Server, in tandem with one or two other solutions, provides the capability to fire up servers and take them down again according to time of day and the usage requirements of the organisation. In an ideal world, an administrator could effectively dismantle the data-centre, or reduce it down to a bare minimum, at 10pm and then start it all back up again at 6am the next morning.

A great article. We need to ensure that whilst we implement new technologies that we update the administration, the processes and reporting that we already have in place. How do we manage charge back of a virtual machine if it’s only there for the day? Do you pay for the month? What about the Windows/Linux license as well as the various other applications?

At the same time, from a reporting standpoint how do we manage the assets, the server count per business line for example  – do we include a percentage to account for temporary instances? What is a change in virtualization? Adding a new virtual machine? Re-installing the operating system on a virtual machine.

You’ve got a virtualization platform – how do you build machines? Are they templates where a user uses a provisioning web site? Or is it the traditional mount a cdrom and install the os?

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