• Almost 25% of our servers are dedicated to development functions, so that's clearly a big place to see some gains. OTOH, it looks like virtualization is the right solution for development boxes and we may want to wait until Microsoft's Virtual Server is officially released this fall.
• Production web and application servers account for almost one third of our servers, but it is going to be easier to consolidate new applications (designed for cohabitation) than existing ones. The ROI has a crummy upside/downside ratio in this space.
• Consolidating File Servers could be a fairly quick hit with the introduction of Network Attached Storage, but the server reduction is not very significant.
• Database consolidation is a must, but relatively few instances are running on stand-alone servers. Lots of instances on web and app servers. That means database consolidation will be a prerequisite to web and app server consolidation, but will not offer any immediately tangible benefits.
• Exchange consolidation is already happening. We may get credit for it, but it would be a waste of time to recommend doing anything more in this space.
• We have about 70 servers dedicated to CA-Unicenter functions, most of them simply gathering SNMP traps. That doesn't seem right, but it hardly seems worth bothering with either.
• We have two hundred domain controllers. I wonder how easily those can be consolidated? It should be a strictly performance-related issue.

What factors do we need to consider when determining which workloads to consolidate first? I suggest the following:

• Potential to reduce server count. I would like to focus on workloads that offer the greatest promise for reducing the number of servers we have.
• Ease of consolidation (or risk). If a workload is going to be difficult (i.e. expensive) to consolidate, I will want to defer it unless the ROI is just staggering. Application servers looks like a promising area, count-wise, but most of those are Windows DNA applications using DCOM and MTS. With a mix of DLL dependencies these are not going to be easily consolidated without either hardware support (blade or some kind of hard partitioning) or software support (virtualization). Either way, this is not a quick hit.
• Availability of technology solutions. It is one thing to recommend using blade servers to reduce floor space consumption, it is another to make it available. While blade servers make lots of sense, it is going to take a while to build the supporting infrastructure (network, cooling, weight limits).

9:24:11 AM