Is dynamic power management impacting the hardware MTBF?

Vendors & Products >
- Radar
  The Virtualization Industry Radar is the virtualization.info database tracking over 80 virtualization vendors and more than 100 products.
- Roadmap
  The Virtualization Industry Roadmap tracks the past and upcoming releases for all the virtualization products listed on the Radar.
- Buyer's Guide
  The virtualization.info Buyer's Guide compares the feature-set of several products in the same market segment.
- Reviews
  The virtualization.info Review Center publishes extensive and unbiased analysis of enterprise virtualization products.
Market Trends >
- Challenges
  The Virtualization Industry Challenges report tracks the top 10 issues when embracing virtualization.
- Predictions
  The Virtualization Industry Predictions tracks all the forecasts of the leading analysis firms about the virtualization market for the next 5-10 years.
Resources >
- Webcasts
  The virtualization.info video library collects webcasts from the industry vendors about several virtualization topics.
- Interviews
  Unplugged discussions with virtualization leaders.
Services >
- Rent-A-Lab
  Rent-A-Lab is an on-demand data center that virtualization professionals can rent and access remotely.
- Job Board
  The virtualization.info's Job Board is the place to go when looking for a new cool job in the virtualization industry.
- Bookstore
  The virtualization.info's Bookstore allows to browse and buy any English book about virtualization technologies. Powered by Amazon.
Get Together >
- Vanguards Community
  The virtualization.info Vanguards network connects over 2000 vitualization professionals across the globe.
- Virtualization Congress
  The Virtualization Congress is the virtualization.info's independent conference about application, OS and hardware virtualization.

日本語

Is dynamic power management impacting the hardware MTBF?

Posted by Alessandro Perilli | Monday, December 01, 2008 | 2 Comments

There’s no doubt that hardware virtualization has a chance to significantly reduce the power and cooling usage in most companies thanks to remarkable server consolidation ratios. But some vendors are trying to use automation to make the IT greener (as marketing people love to say).

Virtual Iron and VMware now offer the capability to consolidate into a single server the virtual machines served across a bunch of virtualization hosts.
The VMs are live migrated and the empty virtualization hosts are powered off until there is an actual need for them.

While this sounds a great thing it may have some side effects that few companies are considering.

Chris Wolf, Senior Analyst at Burton Group, is wondering if this dynamic power management has a concrete impact on the hardware mean time between failure (MTBF).

Interesting enough the major IHVs that he contacted didn’t perform any test to find out.

Labels: Virtual Iron, VMware

Bookmark & share this article | Email this article

| Subscribe to virtualization.info

2 Comments

anykey Tuesday, December 02, 2008 12:14:00 AM

usually only harddisks suffer from being turned on and off, and because of that reduce their life expectancy by 1/3, but as with most virtualization implementations, servers have no local storage for data and over more often no hard disks at all. So my guess would be that this would not have any impact on MTBF.

nosatalian Thursday, December 04, 2008 1:53:00 AM

What he said <--

What exactly is going to fail by turning on and off? Perhaps some fans might flake out earlier, but I don't think it is a major concern. Anyways, the point of virtualization is that an individual hardware failure/downtime doesn't affect the workload. I get the feeling most of these "concerns" over features such as VMotion and DPM are FUD put out to buy time for Microsoft to catch up in feature parity.

Add New Comment

virtualization.info Editions: 日本語 | iPhone™
virtualization.info Network: virtualization.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress

virtualization.info