VMware White Paper Sample

Let’s look at an Intel and VMware customer, the Virginia Community College System, and how virtualization and a hardware refresh helped them improve energy efficiency and lower costs. The Virginia Community College System oversees 23 colleges spread across 40 campuses. Serving more than 250,000 students per year, the college had reached maximum power and cooling capacity. Unless the IT department found a way to consolidate servers and improve efficiency, the organization would either have to revamp the existing facilities or move to a different building. And with limited resources, moving or retrofitting wasn’t a plausible option.

The IT team for the college system addressed these challenges by refreshing, virtualizing and consolidating its servers. They chose powerful multi-core Intel Xeon processor-based servers and VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise which included VMware ESX Server, VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, as well as other components.

The Virginia Community College System achieved a 15:1 consolidation ratio and removed five racks from their data center, streamlining their data center real estate. In addition, the institution reduced heat output by 90,000 BTU/hour, which equals 7.5 tons less cooling each hour.