Get Those VMs Under Control

By Michelle Savage

June 30, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 4)
IT departments are increasingly implementing virtualization as a way to lower the number of physical servers and ultimately reduce power and cooling costs. However, virtualization experts warn that if virtual machine (VM) management practices aren’t put in place from the start, data centers will suffer from VM sprawl.

Because virtualization makes it easy to deploy VMs, it’s easier than ever for servers to grow like dandelions—a phenomenon known as VM sprawl, in which VMs become unmanaged and uncontrolled as they pop up throughout the IT infrastructure.

Anthony Mar, product marketing manager at Embotics, a virtual server management company, said companies stand to lose thousands of dollars if they allow the number of VMs to grow too quickly without proper care and feeding.

Mar described VM sprawl as proliferation without adequate IT controls. He said that one of the biggest problems with virtualization is that many organizations mistakenly think that once they purchase and set up the basic virtualization infrastructure, rolling out additional VMs is free. However, applications still require processing, memory, storage and networking—all of which cost money.

Mar said these challenges are relatively new to IT managers as they did not exist in the physical environment. “Physical server costs in data centers have a built-in limit,” he said. “As they proliferate, eventually you simply run out of space or budget for power and cooling. If left unchecked, the costs due to virtual server sprawl will eat up your entire software license budget, more and more administrator time, and eventually require more physical servers. It's a situation that worsens as IT budgets grow.”

Keep Track of Your VMs
According to David Link, CEO of ScienceLogic, another major challenge of virtualized environments lies in knowing what’s where. He said that the rapid growth in VMs makes it necessary to plan, deploy and optimize the performance of virtual environments. “Even when you create high availability with VMware, you still need to know what’s going on in the hardware beneath the hypervisor, how the guest operating systems are behaving and how your applications are running. With multiple VMs, it’s harder to get a true representation of what’s connected to what.”

Related Search Term(s): Server management, virtualization

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