The future of server virtualisation appears to be clear. With many organisations having experienced the benefits virtualisation offers, they are now looking to virtualise further; including mission critical systems and increased server density and reliance. In a survey conducted with our customers we found that on average, customers tend to be operating at approximately a 10:1 consolidation ratio with a few exceptions that have reached 30:1. However, this number is small compared to the next generation of server hardware. In general RAM/Memory has often been the limiting resource in a VMware environment and with the cost of RAM being relatively high, most people opted to use either 32GB or 64GB per server. However, server manufacturers have now started to release servers that are capable of having up to 512Gb of RAM. Coupled with an increase in CPU cores, this means that in the future we are expecting organisations to having ratios of 100:1 or even 300:1.

 

This will introduce lots of new challenges and Foundation IT is working with customers to ensure that they can cope with these future demands. One of the key concerns with a greater density of VMs per host is of course performance, both in normal running conditions and how to evacuate virtual machines to another host for maintenance. For this reason we are working closely with Xsigo and Dell to provide customers with a scalable platform that is able to handle the increased performance requirements.