VM Sprawl: Best Pratices to Prevent and Management

What is VM sprawl?

VM sprawl or virtualization sprawl is virtual machines' uncontrolled growth in a network. It occurs when the creation and deployment of VMs is not properly supervised, resulting in too many VMs being underutilized or abandoned.

The consequences of VM sprawl

M sprawl can cause several challenges, including resource waste, increased management complexity, performance degradation, and higher costs, and so on.

• Resource Waste: redundant VMs consume valuable computing resources, such as CPU, memory, and storage, without delivering any meaningful value. This resource waste hampers efficient resource allocation and increases operational costs.

• Increased Management Complexity: As the number of VMs grows, so does their complexity. Tasks like patching, updating, ensuring security compliance, and monitoring performance become increasingly challenging.

• Difficulty of data protection: Too many redundant virtual machines can bring too much time and storage costs for data backup and recovery.

• Higher Costs: The proliferation of VMs brings additional licensing, maintenance, and power costs. Moreover, managing a sprawling VM environment requires additional manpower and resources, further escalating operational expenses.

What causes VM sprawl?

Several factors contribute to the proliferation of virtual machines:

• Lack of Governance: Insufficient policies and governance frameworks for VM provisioning and retirement contribute to VM sprawl. Organizations must establish clear guidelines for VM creation, usage, and retirement to maintain control and prevent unnecessary VM proliferation.

• Poor Visibility: Limited visibility into VM usage and allocation makes it challenging to identify underutilized or abandoned VMs. This lack of oversight exacerbates VM sprawl and its associated consequences. Organizations need robust monitoring and reporting mechanisms to gain visibility into their VM environment.

• Manual Processes: Relying on manual processes for VM provisioning and management is time-consuming and error-prone. Automation is essential to streamline operations, enforce policies, and prevent VM sprawl. Implementing automated provisioning and deployment processes can significantly mitigate VM sprawl risks.

• Shadow IT: Departments or teams creating VMs outside the purview of IT management can contribute to VM sprawl. Lack of centralized control and accountability leads to unregulated VM deployments. Organizations should encourage collaboration and provide self-service portals to ensure all VM deployments go through the proper channels.

How to prevent VM sprawl effectively?

There are some tips for VM sprawl control, and help you prevent virtual machine sprawl effectively.

1. Establish Clear Policies and Governance

Implement comprehensive policies and guidelines for VM provisioning, usage, and deletion. Clearly define VM creation and management. This will help create a controlled environment for VM deployments.

2. Regularly Assess VM Usage and Utilization

Conduct periodic assessments to identify inactive or redundant VMs. Utilize monitoring tools to track resource consumption and make informed decisions about VM consolidation, removal, or optimization. Besides, regularly checking VM usage and utilization can help with efficient resource allocation.

3. Automated Provisioning and Management

Automate the creation, management, and decommissioning of VMs to ensure they are only created when necessary and removed when no longer in use.

4. Foster Collaboration and Communication

Encourage collaboration between IT and business units to ensure VM deployments align with organizational goals. Regular communication and feedback loops enable proactive addressing of VM sprawl concerns. Building a culture of collaboration helps prevent shadow IT and promotes effective VM lifecycle management.

Importance: Regular backup virtual machines 

It is important to create and manage virtual machines efficiently, especially if the number of virtual machines is growing rapidly.

Don't forget to create backups for your VMs if you are running important business or data on them. Once encounter cyberattacks, data disasters, and system crashes, your VM data is vulnerable. To protect your virtual machines, you can rely on a powerful and easy-to-use backup solution - AOMEI Cyber Backup.

Here are some advantages and features of AOMEI Cyber Backup

Now you can click the download button to install this software, then we will guide you on how to use this tool to backup your VMs safely.

Step 1. Download, install, and run AOMEI Cyber Backup on a Windows or Linux computer. In its interface, click "Source Device" > Choose VMware or Hyper-V. Then Click "+Add VMware ESXi" or "Add Hyper-V ". Then add VMs by entering the host information.

Step 2. Click "Backup Task" on the left pane > "Create New Task". Choose "VMware ESXi Backup" or "Hyper-V Bakcup" as the backup type. THen setup Task Name, Target, Schedule, and other settings based on your need.

Step 3. Click the "Start Backup" button to commit the backup task.

Conclusion

VM sprawl management is crucial for organizations that running businesses on virtual machines. Creating VMs with the proper number can achieve the best use of virtualized resources. In this post, we give you some tips to control, avoid, and manage VM sprawl. I hope they can help you.

In addition, it is recommended to regularly back up your virtual machines to avoid data loss. AOMEI Cyber Backup is a great solution that enables you to easily back up Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines.