Engine Networks uses VMware for its virtualization offerings and we thought it would be useful to share some stats on how much consolidation we see in the ‘real world’.

Bear in mind that our sales consultants and engineers tailor solutions primarily for web facing, intensive transactional web systems many with high traffic and peaking around events so what we see is quite different from what might be expected in a more ‘normal’ IT situation (if such a thing exists). We also deal with multiple environments for customers – live/production, pre-production/QA and test – each of which has a different profile.

We manage several hundred VMs today and the average consolidation varies enormously environment to environment. In test environments we see perhaps what you would expect, around 20 VMs per ESX. In pre-production/QA environments we are seeing 8 to 15 VMs per ESX and in live/production environments, the average drops to 5-12 VMs per ESX. This is because most customers see the high availability features of VM as most important in production environments, rather than straight cost savings (although 1:3 or 1:5 is already quite a good saving!). In these cases, a host must be able, at any moment, to handle all the Virtual Machines from another host that is experiencing failure.

Quite a range of results, isn’t it? It shows, to us at least, the need for specialist consultancy and experience to get the best out of your infrastructure. See here for more info.

Tweet This Post