My experience with virtualization

INTRODUCTION: When I first heard about virtualization, I thought it was a good toy to play with for a technology savvy person (aka geek). I carried this notion for some time and followed the progress of virtualization technology in the following years to the point when it become very much a viable option for production environment.
At my last assignment, I saw the environment was grossly underutilized with very powerful servers running just one very simple application which in other words means lying idle and people all around were asking for more servers. We (my team and I) started the analysis of the environment and found out that the development environment was also on physical machines. So that was the first logical step for us to tackle and after getting the buy-in from management and the development team we started moving our servers to virtual environment. We used the P2V conversion tools for some and some we built from scratch. After demonstrating successful operations with higher reliability and performance on virtual platform, we moved to the next item on the ladder, low critical production servers and IT's internal software repositories and servers. After a while we prepared the custom built shipping application to be virtualized. The vendor had some concerns in moving the application on to virtual platform as it had some design flaws. But we have asked them to come up with a new code that would run well on virtual platform.
Although this looks like a run of the mill virtualization story but what is remarkable here is that we achieved 100% of our initial virtualization with no new hardware investment and the overall we were at around 75% of the existing hardware. I reused most of the existing hardware to deploy virtual servers all across.

Examples:
1. HR Office: This was a system that was used by HR dept. to maintain the payroll and employee information for the entire organization. The system took data from its own data entry, from SAP and from the mother system in Japan in the form of daily feeds. Any downtime of the system would have meant a major mishap in the employee records and pay days.
2. Website development servers: A company's face nowadays is their website. My client had their web environment in a development, QA, WIP and production mode with the material moving from one stage to the other seamlessly. All the environment were synchronized and any de-sync would have meant major issues in the websites, user experience and sales. We moved the servers to virtual environment seamlessly without any outage and impact on the developers.

Differentiator:
At our starting point to build the business case for virtualization, I worked with the free Microsoft Virtual Server. Although it is a functional product it seriously lacks features that I would want to see in an enterprise tool. For example, the quick setup mechanism for vmware by building a disk image and copying it everywhere. The management interface also relies heavily on Microsoft proprietory technologies and thus is limited in reach. I cannot manage the environment from any computer and needs to be setup everytime I change my computer or rebuild it (which is very often as a techie) as opposed to the completely web based management interface. As a open source / open systems supporter, I would be more interested to see more and more open standards being employed in organizations that would not tie me down to any particular platform. If your product is really good, then people will use it no matter what technology you use.

All in all, I am convinced about the potential of virtualization and the tremendous benefit that organizations can draw if it is implemented correctly.