Talk of virtual server sprawl brings to mind images of a proliferation of virtual machines causing administrative nightmares and potential security vulnerabilities for IT staff. As if that isn’t bad enough, virtual server management vendor Embotics today released a white paper that details how much money could potentially be wasted on under-utilized, redundant VMs that multiply unchecked in virtual environments.
According to Embotics’ formula and informal customer interviews, a typical virtualized environment can expect to have 30% of their VMs unused, and a virtualized environment with 150 VMs will have between $50,000 and $150,000 tied up in redundant VMs. One customer the vendor interviewed reported 42 VMs that had been offline for more than 90 days. The vendor estimated that another customer had $162,000 tied up in offline, under-utilized VMs. That situation, Embotics says, causes IT shops to incur costs for licensing fees, resource usage and infrastructure space.
“VMs do not have virtual costs. They have real ones, similar but not the same as those for physical servers,” the Embotics white paper reads. “The costs due to virtual server sprawl can eat up your entire software license budget, more and more administrator time, and eventually require the purchase of more physical servers and disks than you need, negating a major benefit of virtualization and one of the foundations of its return on investment.”
