Real-world Experiences Offer Insights

Propelled by the technologies that VMware and Intel have pioneered, virtualization has rapidly gained market acceptance. Indeed, VMware virtual infrastructure software has some 4 million users and more than 20,000 corporate customers, many of which have been built on Intel-based systems. One of those corporate customers is Solvay Pharmaceuticals, a chemical and pharmaceutical group with 29,000 employees in 50 countries, which identified virtualization as the solution to contain server growth. “Because we’re in a regulated industry, we would need to get three new servers every time we needed a new application—one for development, one for test and one for production,” explains Bruce McMillan, Solvay’s manager, emerging technologies. The company implemented VMware® Infrastructure 3 featuring VMware® ESX server hosts on HP ProLiant servers powered by quad-core Intel® Xeon® processors. By going from 65 physical servers to just 17, McMillan says the virtualization implementation “has saved us $1.5 million in pure hardware costs. That’s not even counting power and cooling costs, or staffing costs.” There are many more examples of successful virtualization deployments across many industries and mixes of applications, leading to the emergence of clear best practices that can benefit organizations implementing virtualization for the first time.