Got Sprawl?

It's a well-known fact that virtualization can translate into big savings in the data center. But just as is the case with physical servers, if you're not keeping tabs on what's going on, you can find yourself sprawling out of control. In fact, many newcomers to virtualization are often left so starry-eyed by its capabilities they seem to forget about a few certain IT deployment basics.

According to David Lynch, vice president of marketing for Ottawa-based virtualization management provider Embotics Corp., sprawl, in general, is proliferation without proper control of the data center environment. He points out that sprawl isn't necessarily the number of machines running, but rather how they're being used.

As Lynch put it, one of the symptoms of virtual sprawl is having a volume of running virtual machines that are not doing any meaningful work—that is virtual machines that have no workload.

"It doesn't matter how many machines you're running, as long as it's the right number of machines," Lynch said. "But if you don't have adequate control, if they're not properly managed and you lose track, they're no longer valuable to you."

Embotics recently surveyed itscustomers and found that they were unanimous on sprawl proliferation, Lynch said. "They all realized they don't need 30 percent of their virtual machines."

The Embotics survey also found that, on average, an environment of 150 virtual machines will have anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 locked up in redundancy.

Anil Desai, an independent IT consultant based in Austin, Texas, believes that companies might not understand that as with physical machines, there should be a long view rather than just looking at the fact that virtual machines can be created in a matter of minutes. Or as Desai put it, "just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

"There's a lot involved in the deployment of physical machines," he explained. "You have to evaluate it, purchase it, obtain it, physically rack it, etc. The challenge for virtual machines is that they don't get the same review and oversight as physical machines do. It's almost too easy to deploy virtual machines."

Most experts blame the relative immaturity of the virtualization market, which has been around for years but only recently has taken off as an industrywide solution.

"This technology came in through the back door," Lynch said. "It didn't go through enough testing and evaluation in server consolidation. Yes, it was brought in for consolidation, but it's also being used now for business continuity, which becomes an architecture issue."

There are also too few products on the market that address the entire management of the environment, Desai said. "We're looking at a maturing market, but the management tools lag behind," he said.

"There are a lot of organizations who haven't thought this through," he added. "You have to be responsible and look at this from a strategic standpoint. Ask yourself: How does virtualization fit into a five-year plan? This isn't like upgrading a keyboard—there are a lot of implications for the data center and business."