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If server vendors have embraced virtualization over the years, it’s because the technology tended to be deployed alongside brand-new, high-end boxes. But now that IT budgets are in decline, are IT professionals forsaking new hardware purchases and installing virtualization software on servers they already own?

Yes and no.

“Anecdotally, we’re hearing more interest from the part of our customers to virtualize on existing systems,” said Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s vice president of product marketing, server business unit. “People are extending the useful life of their hardware beyond the typical three-year depreciation cycle.”

But repurposed older servers aren’t typically sent into production, said Rich Brambley, a senior infrastructure consultant at Softchoice Optimus Solutions, a Gold status VMware Authorized Consultant partner in Norcross, Ga., and a blogger at VM/ETC.”I am seeing the repurposing of hardware purchased in the last three years as recovery site virtualization hosts, for example. In some cases they are used as development environments.”

There are a degree of barriers to entry in using older servers for your VMware hosts, these mainly though come in terms of the number of virtual machines on that host coupled with the performance expectations of the end user community. Let’s not forget that as an infrastructure guy I might think it’s only development, a developer might be on a shocking amount of money, a day’s downtime to a development team might have paid for a new ESX server. Keep in mind also the hidden cost, it’s fine to take a DL580 G2, whack on VMware and say there you go, there’s a fully working development environment for the risk guys. Fine, we want to upgrade from the 2.2GHz Xeons to the 2.8GHz, also can we have more storage, so some SAN please, and 8GB RAM isn’t enough, we’ll have 32GB. Just you watch the upgrade cost. Remember, you’re current requirements are those, we need an infrastructure that has room for growth, we need to avoid the situation where the next development virtual machine costs £12,000 because they need to buy an ESX server and all the associated bits.

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