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Fierce Finance IT

When most people think about the downside of virtualization, the standard knee-jerk reaction is to start talking about speed and latency. But there’s a better documented concern out there: Sprawl. You may have noticed that the huge rise in virtual machine (VM) capacity in the financial services industry has led to the proliferation of virtual machines without adequate control. At some point, the buildup of these underutilized machines can really cut into the ROI.

A recent customer study by Embotics found that even in reasonably well controlled environments, at least 30 percent of the VMs were redundant. In some cases, the figure was as high as 50 percent, at a cost of between $1,000 and $3,000 per machine depending on its configuration. (More on the findings here).

Financial service IT executives seem to be more aware of theses costs than their colleagues in other industries. Some will not scale their virtual environments until they have an effective VM lifecycle control and management system in place first, notes David Lynch, Vice President of Marketing for Embotics. This presents an opportunity for the likes of Embotics as well as Fortisphere, ManageIQ and most recently, DynamicOps.

Check out this article talking about virtualization. There’s been a lot written recently talking about virtual sprawl or another one I read recently about how it meant a more complex infrastructure. But then I’ve always thought that you should be managing your virtual world just as you would the physical one, issues of server management and security, of decommissioning and utilization remain just as important – that you aren’t virtualizing a ghost server.

One thing to remember – you only knew you had ghost servers in your data center when an engineer walked around and checked for servers powered off, at the start up screen etc, the only difference in the virtual world is that it’s so much easier to provision a new server and report on it.

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