The Target Problem—Rampant System Over-Provisioning

The key problem the Virtual Server Environment is designed to address is rampant over- provisioning of systems for the workloads they are running. Even today most customers admit to average system utilization numbers in the 25–30% range, and that is on higher-end 64-bit HP servers. It is not uncommon for utilization in the 32-bit Windows and Linux environment to be in the single digits. Figure 1-1 shows an example of the average utilization of a large number of servers in a datacenter.

Figure 1-1. Average utilization of servers across a large datacenter

In this figure you can see that a large ...

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