School districts across the country have always had to do more with less. Funding goes only so far, leaving administrators and IT staff to find innovative ways to save money while maintaining a high level of academic quality. Creating virtual servers accomplishes both tasks, district technology personnel say. Virtual environments not only allow districts to use fewer servers, but they also often enhance performance, saving their users money on electricity and the cost of new equipment. In the current business climate, virtualization may well be one of the very few win-win situations. Not many technology projects can achieve ROI in a single year, but the School District of the Chathams' server-virtualization project did just that. The six-school, 3,700-student K-12 district reduced the number of servers it uses by 60 percent, from 44 to 18, reports John Abdelmalak, director of technology for the district, which is based in Chatham, New Jersey. Three Dell servers in the data center run VMware ESX to allow virtualization, and a server in each of the district's six sites runs VMware's free ESXi software. Lane Virgin, systems administrator for Bonneville (Idaho) Joint School District 93, says the virtualization solution from Virtual Iron has helped the district reduce its physical server count by 13 while offering unparalleled reliability. "I'm pleased to see a product that cares about the Mac shops out there," says Micah Baker of Parallels Server for Mac. Baker is district technology coordinator for the Oregon City (Oregon) School District, which was using the Parallels product six months before it was released to the commercial market. As a result of this project, the district has reduced the number of servers it needs from 44 to 15, cutting the total cost of IT ownership by nearly two-thirds.