Info-Tech has found that hardware acquisition costs can be mitigated by 40 to 75% through consolidation. However, consolidation savings will vary depending on factors such as OS and virtualization licensing costs. Of particular impact will be the consolidation ratio: the number of virtual machines to be hosted per physical machine.
Use this calculator to:
- Get a sense of the cost difference (savings) of consolidating servers in a virtual environment against the cost of buying individual physical servers for each application.
- Measure the impact on savings of various virtualization and Windows licensing options.
- Determine the impact on overall savings of increasing and decreasing the number of virtual instances per physical machine (the consolidation ratio).
Default numbers in this tool are based on a modest consolidation project for 18 physical servers that need to be replaced. This involves purchasing three servers and VMware’s vSphere Essentials Plus Kit for High Availability and Business Continuity, as well as Windows Server 2008 R2 Data Center Edition.