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Make the Most of Server Consolidation
Use the built-in features and stability of Windows Server 2003 to consolidate and reduce the number of servers your network holds.
by Danielle Ruest and Nelson Ruest

Posted November 6, 2003

For This Solution: Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition; Windows Server 2003, DataCenter Edition; SQL Server 2000, Enterprise Edition; Exchange Server 2003, Enterprise Edition

According to Microsoft, more than 30 percent of Windows servers still run Windows NT. According to other sources, it's even more than that. Of this "official" 30 percent, 80 percent are used for the top five workloads—file and print, networking, e-mail, database, and line of business (LOB) applications—but rarely together on the same server. This is the traditional role to which NT is relegated: the single-purpose server. Most shops still running Windows NT and many shops now running Windows 2000 still look at their servers in the same way. With NT, this approach was reasonable. NT itself was a solid product, but many of the operations that organizations performed could lead it to instability. Often, the best way to deal with this instability was to dedicate the server to one specific role. Unfortunately, this approach has led to the proliferation of servers within organizations. Most NT servers are never used to their full capacity; they rarely run at more than 15 percent utilization in terms of processing power.

This approach worked in the NT world, but in today's world where everyone must do more with less, it is fast becoming obsolete. Just think of it. With the number of patches and service packs you must continually apply to make sure your servers are safe and secure, using single-purpose servers just doesn't make any sense any more. It only leads to too many servers to manage. But before this approach can change, people have to change their attitudes toward the way they work with servers. Traditionally, new products and applications are introduced into a network through a specific project. Each time a new project arrives, IT tells the project team members they need to bring in or buy their own server. Why? Because it is easier to bring up a new server for a new task than it is to go to existing IT clients and ask them if they are willing to share their processing power with another project. If we are to reduce the complexity of our networks, we have to change the way we work with projects. We have to learn to share processing power and communicate our needs more clearly. This is the formulation of a critical business problem everyone must face—if not today then very soon.

But what does it mean? If we can't use single-purpose servers, then what can we do? Consolidate, my friends. Consolidate and gain—lower management costs, decreased maintenance efforts, and higher server utilization. According to Bob Ellsworth, a director in the Microsoft Windows Server Group, the first place to begin is with an assessment. And the best place to begin this assessment is during a migration project. "Most of our customers that envision server consolidation do it during a migration from NT to Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003," states Ellsworth. "There are, though, some customers that perform after-the-fact rationalizations—server functionality reviews and reductions—to profit from the increased robustness and stability built into our later operating systems."

Yes, indeed. Rationalization—a process focused on decreasing the number of servers and applications in the enterprise—should be part of any migration-planning process to reduce diversity. Rationalization affects not only server hardware through server consolidation practices but also the applications and utilities that run on these servers. The best time to perform a rationalization exercise is during a migration project, but it can also be done at a later stage, when the new network has stabilized; the same can apply to consolidation.

One of the easiest assessments you can perform is a return on investment (ROI) calculation. You can find some fast-and-easy online tools for performing ROI calculations—including some by server vendors, so caveat emptor—and you will find differing approaches to elements of the ROI calculation, such as weighing the benefits of consolidation. For example, if increased server availability is considered a big benefit, this could lead to implementing server clusters during the consolidation. The reasoning is that if you are going to have fewer servers serving more clients, then you had better make sure these servers have higher availability. For Microsoft, consolidation and availability are two different issues. "Consolidation and availability respond to two different customer needs," says Ellsworth. "You can combine them if you want to, but it is not always necessary to reap the benefits from one or the other." Nevertheless, all editions of Windows Server 2003 include some form of server clustering (see Table 1).