VM Sprawl , Risk Life Cycle and Practices to prevent

What is VM sprawl?

Virtualization sprawl is a phenomenon that occurs when the number of virtual machines (VMs) on a network reaches a point where administrators can no longer manage them effectively. Virtualization sprawl is also referred to as?virtual machine sprawl,?VM sprawl?or?virtual server spraw.

Life Cycle of Risks associated with virtual machine sprawl

5 practical tips to prevent VM sprawl

1. Maintain an inventory

Create a common inventory for all the virtual machines and hosts, and update it periodically. This inventory helps you understand the function of every VM in your environment and helps you keep track of the VMs created for multiple purposes by different IT staff.

2. Categorize VMs based on groups or departments

Create groups based on VM functions or classify them by their departments. Whether you're creating a new VM, optimizing the existing virtual environment, or applying new configurations, these groups make VM management easy.

3. Identify idle VMs

Based on bandwidth consumption, audit the VMs and identify idle VMs early before they take up too much disk space and cache memory. After this, you have two choices:

a. Delete the VM along with its junk files if it's no longer needed.

b. Archive the VM if you need it again down the road for a similar function.

4. Identify VMs with under- or over-allocated resources

Since virtual machines are used to provide a top-notch end-user experience, it's crucial to ensure that they have enough resources to do it. To achieve this, you need to constantly monitor virtual machines to identify VMs that have high CPU, memory, and disk utilization.

Similarly, you need to monitor VMs to identify the ones that have over-allocated memory and disk space. You can then modify configurations to ensure your VMs receive sufficient resources, which can help you avoid potential performance issues.

5. Audit VMs periodically

It's a good practice to audit your VMs from time to time to identify anomalies in their performance. Generate reports periodically and analyze important parameters such as CPU usage, memory usage, and disk usage to evaluate their health.

This helps you identify patterns in performance degradation early on for individual VMs and make more informed VM management decisions. This is a holistic approach every IT admin can adopt to prevent VM sprawl.