Caching In – the magic behind vSphere’s CPU scheduler

One of the most important objectives of virtualizing a new or existing infrastructure is efficiency…both operational and financial. Virtualization wouldn’t be where it is today without a means of getting the most bang for the buck and clearly demonstrating the value-add of system consolidation — whether within your labs, server rooms, datacenters, or across the entire enterprise. To justify virtualization projects of any significance you have to hit your leadership where it hurts (tickles)…the corporate wallet. What better way to do that than consistently reducing acquisition and operational costs to your project?

Of course I’m not suggesting you’ll be swimming in cash (or a nice bonus) the moment you deploy your first hypervisor, although this is a first step in the right direction. Witnessing a rack of 10 x 2U servers reduced to a single host (i’m being conservative), while centralizing management and often increasing performance, is nothing short of wonderful. How about 100 of these same servers into a single rack? 100 loaded racks into 10?  Enough said. VMware’s value proposition is very clear in this arena. In keeping with my promise of no sales pitches, i’ll spare you the ROI/TCO chatter.  Just consider this – the cost of maintaining 100 legacy servers is drastically greater than acquiring 10 brand new uber-hosts sporting the latest chipsets, energy efficiency, memory/cpu capacity, and all the necessary vSphere licensing.