The Case Study of an F/OSS Virtualization Platform Deployment and Quantitative Results

In this paper we present results from the deployment of F/OSS virtualization platform. This platform was used both for providing existing NDC’s services, in a production environment, and for developing additional new services using agile development methods. In greater detail, F/OSS virtualization was selected as the best solution in order to meet a number of different NDC’s requirements, these are in fact quite common in a wide area of IT environments and projects. NDC’s virtualization benefits are quantified while F/OSS specific benefits are especially highlighted. These include, apart from reduced energy consumption and hardware requirements, reduced licensing costs and most importantly significantly increased flexibility due to combining virtualization and F/OSS. This combination leads to project and organization wide benefits. These make F/OSS virtualization a particular well fit for organization using agile development methods and facing a number of strict technical, economic, administrative or regulatory constraints. Similar situations can be found variety of situations, from SMEs to government organizations. Finally, focusing on licensing and maintenance costs, we compare in a general way the benefits for using F/OSS virtualization when compared to closed source virtualization or non virtualized platforms.