Linux + Xen + cheap hardware = huge savings!
I suppose it was somewhat nice pumping some heat into the office now that things are cooling off in south Texas, but the number of computers I had running in my home office was really starting to push the limits of the cooling capacity I could pump into the room. Not to mention, the power bill! I had a total of six machines running at any given time, plus the various networking gear to support them and other machines on the network. If my UPS can be trusted, I was sucking down on average 800 to 830 watt/hours, which means at todays electric rates about $1,150 per year. Plus the cooling costs. I don’t care who you are, that’s a good chunk of change being spent in one room.
So I set out to implement some server consolidation. Sure I’m all about saving the planet and all, but it has to make financial sense as well. The first step was to find an inexpensive motherboard and cpu combo that provided virtualization extensions (ie. AMD-V or Intel VT), and could drop into low power states when idle. Picked up a new AMD 4850e cpu, and an ASUS M2A-VM board, plus 8 gigs of ram, for just over 200 bucks shipped. The rest of the components I had sitting around from the plethora of other machines, and in a few minutes the machine was built. I installed Ubuntu, then Xen, and configured the drives as a big empty physical volume group for the VMs to use.
Fast forward a couple hours, and the machine is now responsible for 4 of the previous six computers’ duties. I’m still running a dedicated machine for the firewall, my MacBook Pro for my main workstation, and of course the ancillary networking hardware. Power usage is, according to the UPS, now in the range of 460 watt/hours! Not quite half, but easily a $500+/year savings, likely more counting cooling savings. A great start by any measure.