Blade Watch

http://www.bladewatch.com/2009/09/04/how-old-is-my-server/

I’ve published the file which is in the previous post on the documents page, or you can download it here.

The concept is for those management/inventory reports where you’re trying to establish where you are with the server estate for consolidation/hardware or server virtualization project.  They dates are of course a guide only, and referenced from the HP quick specs guide, they do not constitute the official manufacture date of your server, though HP or your service provider should be able to provide more information if required.

After publishing this Chris called me and asked what guide I used to determine if a server should be virtualized?

At the moment (though situations change as do standards), I’ve been thinking that anything older than a G4, shall we say 2004 should be virtualized.

At this point my business as usual mind feels horrified and notes that these servers work, they typically (if managed and maintained) need not represent a higher support cost than the newer servers and not everything should be virtualized – that 700GB file server might be best left as a DL380 G3 with 4×300GB drives rather than eating half the storage on my ESX solution. Anyway, many at this point would be horrified and state that everything can and they would be right in most cases, however, as a vehicle to moving towards that scenario, let me summarize my position:

• Servers of this age are fully depreciated or should be;
  • We have obtained value for money from the underlying asset – five years is a good run and virtualization could extend this at relatively low cost
• We need to examine the economics of running older servers;
  • Cost of upgrading components of servers older than 2004 will be relatively higher, as will support contract/warranty costs
  • Environmental efficiency issues – particularly if you take a x86 server from 1999 as a file server and establish a power usage to performance ratio 380w for 45GB storage for example.
• Specifications of the servers stated:
  • Covering as much of the server estate possible, without encountering those servers that might have a higher amount of RAM/Disk space etc to maintain the number of machines virtualized per ESX server. It’s fine to say we can virtualize a DL380 G5 with 600GB of storage, we absolutely can, but would I not rather get rid of 12 older machines that use more power, rack space and would consume less (as a percentage of disk space/memory and cpu) than a newer server?

What works for you will depend on your business, your internal standards and the individual applications involved.

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