While “clouds” on the internet are a terrible idea they do have their place INSIDE the building. I am currently building and researching exactly this type of internal cloud. In my shop I have two servers. At idle(which is where most of them spend their time) they draw nearly 135 watts from my electrical system. That’s nuts. I have ordered a new server that i am going to put both of my servers onto as virtualized machines. My idle power shold be cut at least in half. Here are the specs of the baseline host I am going to be building from:
Dell Poweredge T110
Ram: Upgraded to 8 gigabytes
Network: at least two network interfaces
Hard disk: 2 x 2 Tterabyte SATA drives
RAID: Linux softwar RAID 1 or H200 hardware raid card depending on client needs(i am going to use Linux software raid)
processor: Intel XEON x3430
Applications:
Windows server standard
Zimbra
Astaro
Untangle
others as determined by client needs.
Hypervisors Undergoing Evaluation:
1. Microsoft Hyper-V
2. KVM
3. Citrix XEN
Cost of hypervisor software: Zero
This is just the bare minimum that ECC will specify for business clients going forward. ECC is currently building the baseline for operational testing in house. Once testing is completed an announcement of release will follow. ECC will be migration all clients to this internal baseline cloud over time.