“Along with sustainability, we chose virtualization to provision servers faster, enjoy the inherent failover and redundancy of a virtualized environment, allow for almost immediate changes and improve portability,” Klinner says. “Energy consumption is lowered in this process, supporting our sustainability goals.”
Although a number of agencies cite energy efficiency as a major benefit of data center virtualization, exact numbers can be difficult to come by.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which stood up its first virtual environment in the mid-2000s, hasn’t tracked energy use metrics associated with the technology. However, virtualization has allowed the agency to reduce the physical footprint of its infrastructure while supporting a maintenance and IT operations workforce that has become more mobile.
“These activities make FEMA more energy-efficient,” says Lizzie Litzow, FEMA’s press secretary.
MORE FROM FEDTECH: Find out which agencies are making progress on data center optimization.
Virtualization Eases Patch to Public Cloud
Although cost and energy efficiency are top drivers of virtualization, they’re far from the only benefits. The technology also eases backups, facilitates cloud migration, simplifies deployment, helps prevent vendor lock-in and allows IT staffers to quickly create testing environments.
“There are so many benefits that I would say, ‘Give me a reason an application shouldn’t be running on a virtual machine,’” says Gardner. “Ninety-nine times out of 100, the application owner would not be able to give me a reason. There may be some reluctance on the part of operators — a fear that performance is going to suffer.”
“In fact, the system is usually going to run identically, if not better, as a result of virtualization,” he adds. “Everyone should apply that same test: ‘Give me a reason an environment shouldn’t be virtualized.’ And usually, people won’t be able to.” For many organizations, virtualization has become something of a stepping-stone on the path to public cloud migration. Gardner says that some organizations are now considering on-premises server virtualization where they once might have tried to push workloads to the public cloud.
“Five or so years ago, when the cloud was just starting up, people were looking at new virtualization instances almost as a negative, thinking, ‘I should just use the cloud,’” he says.
“Now we’re seeing, if you have legacy applications, in some cases it’s not worth going through the upgrade necessary to migrate them. But if you virtualize them, that’s a quick win until you rearchitect them with cloud-native technologies.”
Klinner says that virtualization, coupled with public cloud resources, helps Interior to better support remote work.