Blog by PQR

Exchange servers are often heavy sized servers and they like and use all the CPU en Memory they get :-)... so is it a good idea to virtualize Exchange servers? Because  virtualization of Exchange servers rarely results in a reduction of  e.g. physical processors I was looking for other reasons. And I found one!

Read this article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd901773.aspx about power utilization in a physical and a virtual environment.

Conclusion:

The study examined power utilization of native and virtual Exchange 2007 environments in a scenario where physical servers were reduced from 8 to 2 but the total number of logical processors remained constant at 32. There was no processor core consolidation, and storage power utilization was not included. In this scenario, there was a 50 percent reduction in server power utilization and a projected savings of 8,582 kWh/year.

When you examine the power savings of the total solution, including servers and storage, you see a 37 percent reduction in power utilization when the MSA60 storage solution is deployed and a 34 percent reduction in power utilization when the MSA70 storage solution is deployed.

Notice that power utilization for the largest DAS solution (MSA70) accounts for less than 50 percent of the total power consumed by the virtual environment and less than 35 percent of the total power consumed by the native environment. When DAS solutions are used, storage is not the primary consumer of power.

Off course this is not the only thing to consider when you doubt about virtaulization of your Exchange servers... but it's an important one!