Going Green with Virtualization
This guest blog post comes to you from Aaron Clark. Aaron is a Senior Technician at Intellicom and has a very interesting background. Prior to working for Intellicom, Aaron worked at Rackspace Hosting and also for an IT company that did work for the Johnson Space Center. Aaron wanted to write an article about the impact that virtualization can have on power consumption and the environment. Here you go!
If you are anything like me, you often wonder what you will leave behind for your children, and what shape the planet will be in when it is theirs. I am happy to report that many of the big technology companies are also thinking about this and are making hardware and software that is more energy efficient and eco-friendly. Recently, I was able to “Go Green” by turning four old power-hungry servers into virtual copies, providing all the features and technologies they performed when they were physical. The technology is from Microsoft and called Hyper-V, and it can be run on any 64-bit version of Windows 2008 Server. What Hyper-V does is called virtualization, which is defined as “the execution of a software system in an environment separated from the underlying hardware resources.”
On this network there was a workstation for Internet, a Windows 2003 domain controller, a Windows 2008 domain controller, and a Linux mail server. There is now one physical machine running Windows Server 2008 R2. Inside it are virtual copies of the Linux mail server, the 2003 domain controller, and the 2008 domain controller. By virtualizing these servers, not only did I clear up much needed space on the rack, but also considerably reduced the amount of electricity that is consumed.
Now when I think about what I might leave behind to my children, I can rest assured knowing that I am doing my part to leave them a greener world.