Credit Suisse plans to fire 10,000 physical servers with virtualization

That is massive, big daddy of all projects!

That still left a large pool of virtualization candidates -- about 10,000 servers, in fact, most running either Windows or Solaris. In general, their utilization was low, particularly those used in development and test environments where, in both cases, the boxes tended to have more horsepower than needed. That low utilization is apparent in Hilton's expectations of how many VMs he will get per physical server: at least a 20:1 ratio for servers in the development environment; 15:1 to 10:1 for the test and disaster recovery environment; and 5:1 in the production application environment. Hilton's team is now in the process of virtualizing these servers, with plans to be done with 5,000 by early 2009. The group has already virtualized 1,000.

In crafting Credit Suisse's server virtualization strategy, Hilton decided to take a page from the storage virtualization playbook and conceive of the environment as a shared service, not just as a collection of VMs. "We created a complete hosting platform from which we 'sell' slices of capacity," he says. That meant treating physical servers as parts of a bigger resource pool from which capacity could be pulled as needed.

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PS: I'm back in holland, BTW.