The principal advantage of server and storage virtualization is that your existing equipment becomes more efficient. Instead of managing a lot of under-utilized equipment, you make better use of what you have, preventing the need to tie up your budget with additional purchases. At the same time, though, you can expect utilization of your existing servers to increase over time – that’s the point, after all.

With your streamlined IT operation, you wind up introducing a new risk into your datacenter: losing one physical server, because of the consolidated environment, could have a disproportionate effect. Fortunately, a bit of planning up front can help you prepare for this possibility.

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How can virtualizing your server infrastructure help your business development team? Sure, there are clear business benefits to server virtualization, but to draw a straight line to sales and client activity may not seem possible. Step back for a moment and consider how your clients interact with your business, though, and it doesn’t take long to understand how your servers can make a profound difference in your top line.

In just about every business, it’s your existing clients that have the greatest potential for new revenue. New client acquisition is extremely valuable, but it’s also hard-won and far more expensive than engaging your existing client base for new business opportunities. So, if you can deliver a superior experience to your clients, especially if they interact directly or indirectly (e.g., through a call center) with your systems, the IT department has a profound opportunity to influence overall business performance.

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IT directors and CIOs are always looking at the total cost of ownership (TCO) of enterprise-wide technology. The goal, of course, is to keep TCO as low as possible while maximizing the services and capabilities delivered to the business areas. Virtualization provides a variety of cost-containment advantages, making it possible to manage IT expenses without degrading service to end users.

Here are five ways that virtualization can help you lower your infrastructure TCO:

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The problem with “best of breed” platform selections is that you wind up with a heterogeneous infrastructure that can be difficult and costly to manage. When it’s time to add to a particular platform’s footprint, you need to write another check, even if there are under-utilized solutions elsewhere in your environment. Unless you have commensurate equipment available, there’s no choice but to invest more. With server and storage virtualization technologies, you can break out of this rut, and extract more value from investments you’ve already made.

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In this series, we’ll focus on the implications of specific technology solutions for CFOs. Though they are the keepers of a company’s financial health, they don’t always understand the advantages that come with certain technology solutions, and IT professionals sometimes take a suboptimal approach when explaining these concepts to the finance team. This series is intended to help make those conversations easier and more effective.

Your CFO is focused on keeping costs under control, and a request for new technology tends to be met with skepticism. Whether he thinks you’re chasing something new and exciting or believes that the status quo is just fine for now, the CFO isn’t likely to start writing checks just because you asked. Emphasizing the technological advantages of a particular solution won’t help much either, especially for virtualization technologies, which can be difficult for anyone working outside the infrastructure team to grasp fully. So, when you reach out to your CFO to talk about the need for a virtualization solution (e.g., storage, server or desktop), you need to make sure your pitch is tailored to a decidedly non-technical audience.

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Citrix has announced the availability of XenServer 5.6, which has several new features. This enterprise-ready, cloud-proven virtualization platform delivers the capabilities necessary to create and manage a virtual infrastructure …. at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions. XenServer 5.6 will be available on May 28, 2010.

Last year, Citrix was able to double XenServer’s market share, and it expects to grow it another 18 percent by the end of 2010. XenServer has been selected as the back-end virtual infrastructure for around 40 percent of all Citrix XenDesktop VDI implementations.

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How much of your datacenter is dark? At any given time, you have systems that aren’t being used. Oddly, this is often intentional. Your capacity planning exercises are designed to show how much you need under a variety of circumstances, and the need to handle peak usage means there will be occasions when servers and storage are under-utilized. In fact, this will generally be the case – you’ll have dormant systems more often than you have heavily utilized systems. This translates to lost potential. Unlock the potential of under-utilized systems, and you can defer IT investments, gain more value from existing equipment and streamline your IT operation.

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There’s a new Xen® hypervisor in town! The latest from Xen.org is that Xen 4.0, the most advanced open-source hypervisor, is now available. It reflects the efforts of more than 50 technology companies, universities and experts on virtualization. Xen 4.0 leverages the best network cards available, adds better memory and security to drive virtualization infrastructure and makes virtualization suitable for all workloads.

With Xen 4.0, you can deploy virtualization “across every server in a datacenter, bringing ease of management, secure architecture, high availability, agility and efficiency to all applications. ”

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Whether you realize it or not, you’re betting your entire company on your disaster recovery and business continuity solution. If you are unable to recover quickly in the wake of a catastrophe, you could incur additional unexpected costs, lose planned and potential revenue and even fail to get the business back up and running.

Storage and server virtualization solutions can help you make your existing D/R plan more effective. Here are four ways you can use storage and server virtualization to improve your disaster recovery and business continuity environment:

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There has been much ado lately about the new entries by enterprise vendors into the server hardware space. Blades, blades, and more blades. They come in all shapes, sizes, and colors now.

But, are they relevant in the virtualization environment any more?

Yes. I am challenging the conventional wisdom that blade servers are the best way to go for your datacenter, primarily because virtualization is leading to the commoditization of the datacenter. The hypervisor is becoming a giveaway while management for those hypervisors become the product ‘for sale’. Why should server hardware be exempt from this downward pricing pressure?

In classic ProLiant style, HP is releasing what looks to be the next big thing while it’s competitors are catching up to the last big thing. Consider this: The HP DL4×170h G6 server, configured with each of its four nodes having dual Quad-Core E5504 (Yes, those are Nehalem’s), 24GB RAM, six 1GBps NIC ports, and a 250GB mirror is available direct from HP for $15,207. If you do some quick math, that puts 64Ghz of processor power and 96GB of RAM into 2U’s of rack space.

You could argue that the DL1000 series isn’t enterprise class hardware like the DL300 or DL500 series gear; yes the disk is SATA – but aren’t you going to be using the local disk only for the 15GB of space for your hypervisor? The important data is going to be on back end storage, right?

What about interconnects and the cabling nightmare of having all of these individual ports to connect? The high density of blade servers creates a whole new set of networking problems of their own. Connecting 10GBps uplinks to individual blade enclosures is costly, and if you have 16 servers, your uplinks are oversubscribed – and that in a 1-to-1 physical world. Now compound that with multiple VMs on each of those oversubscribed uplinks and you’re stacking cards on top of cards.

You might also make the argument that 24GB of RAM is light for a virtual host. Maybe, but you can swap out the UDIMMs for RDIMMs (a bit pricier, for sure) and each node can then support up to 144GB each. Given that you get four servers in 2U, you may even find that one node can be a virtual host while another is a dedicated physical server. Scalable nodes offer the density and flexibility of blades withtout the environmental challenges, making them practical for branch deployments as well.

So how many utility, application, web, file, directory, or ‘other’ virtual servers do you have taking up valuable CPU or RAM on your ‘big iron’ virtual hosts that could just as easily run on one of these nodes for a fraction of the hardware cost? Do virtual desktops make sense on ‘big iron’ hardware?

While I’m not quite ready to say that the scalable node server is the answer for all of your datacenter computing needs, but I think it’s something that has received little coverage and may be a platform that deserves a look.