Letting the number of virtual machines grow exponentially could cost an organization thousands of dollars in redundant servers and underutilized resources, according to virtual server management start-up Embotics. 

Embotics this week released a white paper report "Estimating the Real Cost of Virtual Sprawl," examining the cost behind the sprawl. The ease with which administrators can provision virtual servers could belie the fact that the resources needed to support virtual machines can get expensive, the vendor study states. The definition of virtual server sprawl is the proliferation of virtual machines without adequate IT control in place. Once an IT organization pays for the basic virtualization infrastructure, it might seem as though rolling out additional virtual machines is free.

"Applications need processing, memory, storage and networking, whether they are contained in a [virtual machine] or not," reads the report by Anthony Mar, product marketing manager at Embotics. "The more [virtual machines] you have the more of these resources you will need and the more it costs."

The company devised a set of criteria to determine the cost of under-utilized virtual machines in an organization. Embotics interviewed customers to determine classes of costs for a virtual machines. The vendor determined costs could be derived from infrastructure, management systems, server software and administration resources and expenses.

"On average, an environment of 150 [virtual machines] will have anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 locked up in redundant [virtual machines]," Embotics estimates based on its formula.

The vendor says some of its customers have found after doing a physical audit that more than 50% of the virtual machines in their environment were redundant. Embotics scaled the number back to a more conservative 30% and estimated that the average licensing costs per generic Windows or Linux server fell between $1,000 to $3,000. One customer reported to Embotics that $50,000 of disk and license costs were tied up in 42 offline virtual machines that had been inactive for greater than 90 days.

Embotics argues the flexible nature of a virtual server environment presents a challenge in controlling sprawl and containing costs not normally an issue within the confines of physical servers.

Whitepapers

• The Trend from UNIX to Linux in SAP(r) Data Centers
• Secure Wireless Printing Options
• Improve Virtual Storage TCO by Comparing Vendors
• Making IT Invisible
• Best Practices for VMware ESX Server
• Virtualizing Storage for VMware Success

View more DATA CENTER whitepapers

Webcasts

• Branch Office Trends and Best Practices
• Data Protection and Application Availability for Your VMware Environment with Veritas NetBackup and Cluster Server for VMware ESX
• Making NetBackup Highly Available with Storage Foundation HA
• Best Practices for Deploying WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery
• Tips and Techniques for Remote Data Backup and Delivery
• WAN Optimization Landscape

View more DATA CENTER webcasts

Special Reports

• Executive Guide: Storage Heats Up
• Symantec State of the Data Center Report
• Data Centers: At the center of the action
• Executive Guide: Virtualization Reality Check
• Executive Guide: Data Center Decisions
• Get More From Your WAN

View more DATA CENTER special reports