As management tools for virtualization mature, the time and effort required to spin up a new virtual machine has decreased. And with Microsoft’s recent changes to their licensing model – eliminating the OS license fee for virtual machines – the monetary expense has decreased as well. From the perspective of application administrators, the cost of a virtual machine has become effectively zero. By now, everyone is likely familiar with the term “virtual machine sprawl”. Unfortunately, the problem is likely to worsen as investment in virtualization increases. Over time, virtual machines that are no longer used remain in the environment, and chew up valuable resources that can be better used for other applications. If these stale virtual machines are not properly identified and cleaned up, it can have a dramatic impact on the overall performance of your virtual infrastructure, as well as incorrectly contribute to capacity planning calculations. Without the right tools in place, cleaning up virtual machine sprawl can be a painful endeavor.

To prevent sprawl, I would suggest one of the following two strategies. Ideally, both would be used.

The first would be to ensure that there are some checks in place for creating virtual machines.

· Does this virtual machine need to be monitored?

· Is the monitoring team aware of this new virtual machine and its monitoring requirements?

· Is this virtual machine being created to serve a temporary need?

· Who will be responsible for removing it later?

Answering some of these questions before creating the virtual machine can dramatically increase your chances of not losing control of it later.

The second approach would be to have a great tool for virtualization management in place. This tool should be able to assess the current capacity needs of your virtual infrastructure, as well as quickly identify stale virtual machines. Identifying stale virtual machines might not always be straight forward. But, if you have the right tools in place that can accurately present where resources are not being best utilized, you have a much better chance of keeping virtual machine sprawl under control. After all, the ability to be nimble with your virtual infrastructure is a large part of why it’s there in the first place.

Savision’s Vital Signs for Hyper-V can provide insight into the health and performance of your Hyper-V hosts, as well as which virtual machines are consuming the bulk of the resources. This information can be very useful in determining if your virtual machines are appropriately sized. Vital Signs will also graphically present the storage footprint used by virtual machines, as seen in the snippets below. This can streamline finding virtual machines that are consuming large amounts of storage, and help you identify opportunities to free up space in your storage subsystem.

Vital Signs for Hyper-V can also show all the virtual machines in your Hyper-V environment, and what applications are running on those virtual machines. Having that information in one view, greatly improves the ability to identify stale virtual machines that can be removed to free up resources.

Stay tuned over the next few months, as Savision will have some exciting announcements at MMS around how to better manage your Hyper-V environment.

If you want to contact us about Vital Signs for Hyper-V or something else, Click Here!