There's a lot of talk about "green IT" these days. And where better to start than server virtualization? Here are 4 tips to ensure your server virtualization investment pays the dividends you expect:

1) Control virtual server sprawl through cost accounting. Even if it is only tracked through an Excel spreadsheet, know the purpose and owner of each virtual machine. Come up with some way to bill for the resources the virtual machine is using. Even simple billing can pay dividends as users realize that they may not require the resources. Archive aggressively and store the virtual machine files in inexpensive storage (e.g. tapes).

2) Optimize your virtual infrastructure through monitoring and analysis. You can use tools such as PowerRecon or Cirba, or an Excel spreadsheet that charts your physical and virtual machine memory and CPU utilization. It may be less expensive to add more memory to an existing server than to purchase a new server. Don't forget about the power consumption of a new server for the lifetime TCO.

3) Look into power savings capabilities such as LivePower for infrastructure that experiences large swings in utilization, such as dev/test environments. LivePower optimizes data center power consumption by monitoring resource utilization in the virtual data center. When there is excess CPU capacity, LivePower consolidates virtual machines onto fewer physical servers and shuts down the remaining devices based on pre-defined policies. When the virtual machine load increases beyond pre-defined thresholds, LivePower turns physical servers back on and live migrates virtual machines to rebalance the virtual data center and ensure that resource requirements and service levels are met.

4) Don't forget about combining storage virtualization with server virtualization. In many cases it is advantageous to use the storage server's thin provisioning capabilities to reduce the total amount of storage used. Frequently storage utilization is much less than the entire amount provisioned. This can add up to significant GB of storage over your virtual infrastructure.

For more tips on financial prudence in general, our CEO, Ed Walsh recently spoke on the topic for the Boston Business Journal.

We polled our customer base recently and I wanted to share some of the results. The most gratifying response was that 93% of the respondants agreed with the statement "I would purchase Virtual Iron again." We're really proud of the value customers receive from our product. And many of those customers want to be public references. We will be expanding our case studies many fold over the coming months.

A couple other items of note from the survey: the top criteria for purchasing Virtual Iron are price, ease of use, and functionality. This isn't much of a surprise to us, as we believe we offer the best value in the virtualization market, with advanced features such as LivePower and LiveCapacity, all at a price you can afford.