Virtual servers: real-world issues [special report]

THE SOARING POWER of server hardware, recently boosted by multicore processors, has focused IT managers' minds on how much power - both electrical and compute - they were wasting. Many servers installed with software like Active Directory may only see average utilisation of 20% or less. These are good candidates for virtualisation. Consolidating several of these types of underused server still leaves spare capacity to accommodate overhead demanded by the virtualisation software, which can account for 20% of overall processing time depending on the software used.