No space at the inn

OK, for a number of months now I have been using the explanation "Sorry, but we have no room at fulfill that request."  Many of you have been the recipient of this sort of email and you may be thinking that I have just been using this as an excuse.  While there are many things that impact the "room" that is available, let me just talk about physical room today.

Within our server room we have a number of racks.  These racks are industry standard racks for holding rack mounted servers.  (Hence the name similarity).  These racks contain 42 U of space. and we have 17 of these racks in place. That's a lot of space.  We are also about 80% full. Theoretically we have enough room for about 70 servers or so, based our own current 2 U standard server.

That was theoretically. In practice we do not have this much usable space. Due to the fact that the older servers had a wide range of sizes, the fact that we put more than just servers in the racks (storage enclosures, load balancers, etc), the amount of usable space where we can install our standard server is about 72 U in size; or about 36 servers. This is pretty close to the number of servers that we need to install, but this gives us absolutely no room for growth. (Based upon meetings I've had recently, we are going to be growing.)

So, how do we free up space? Virtual machines.

We have converted about 40 machines to the virtual variety in the past few months. We want/need, to do more and we are going to that. My personal goal is to free up another 50 U of space in the next couple of months. so, that we can have that room for growth. We need some help from Microsoft at this point as we are having problems with one of their "P2V" (physical to virtual) tools that is making this transition a lot easier.  They have managed to replicate our problem and are working on a solution.

We are currently in the process of mapping out precisely what is in our server room, which rack it sits in and exactly where in the rack it is taking up space.  Based upon this very detailed map we will be able to plan out where new machines should go and what we need to do in order to consolidate some of our fragmented free space.  (Much like a disk defragmenter, but on a much larger scale.)

This is not the final solution, however, as a larger battle still looms and we will discuss that tomorrow.