Embotics, the Virtualization Lifecycle Management™ Company, today introduced a whitepaper describing the costs associated with virtual sprawl and suggestions on estimating the cost of sprawl in an enterprise environment. The study also examines the importance of preventing sprawl to reduce costs, and is available for download at: http://www.embotics.com/whitepapers/.

The nature of virtualization frequently leads to the misconception that virtual machines (VMs) have no real associated costs, despite the high costs associated with infrastructure, management, software and administration. The truth is that VMs have real costs similar to physical servers; and these costs increase with virtual sprawl. The costs of virtual sprawl take up budget, time and eventually require the purchase of more physical servers than needed. This can frequently negate the company’s return on investment which is the greatest benefit of virtualization.

“Virtual sprawl not only impacts management, administration and overall security in a data center, it also has a direct link to the bottom line,” said Todd Monahan, data center manager for Alcatel-Lucent. “Increased use of resources, software licenses and administration can, if not managed correctly, consume all of the savings originally created by server consolidation.”

Based on an informal customer survey, a typical virtualized environment can expect to have 30 percent of their VM population unused, and a virtualized environment of 150 VMs will have anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 locked up in redundant VMs. Reducing sprawl can have a real impact on the bottom line, as well as reducing risk. By preventing sprawl, IT administrators are able to maintain control and contain costs, leaving more budget available for other necessary IT spending.

“Most IT planners agree that each time a VM is created, cloned or copied, a cost is incurred,” said Anthony Mar, product marketing manager of Embotics and author of the “Estimating the real cost of sprawl” whitepaper. “The more an IT manager understands these associated costs, the better they are able to optimize their environment. Virtual sprawl is not about the number of VMs deployed, it is about the structure and control of the virtual environment.”