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VM or virtual sprawl is a common problem that can occur in a virtual environment.
Virtualization has given us tremendous power to create new VMs and deploy them
very quickly. But, at the same time, it's meant that oftentimes we can have virtual
machines out there in the environment that are not being used, wasting precious
resources such as CPU, memory, and storage.
The VM Sprawl or Virtual Sprawl dashboard within Virtualization Manager
allows you to proactively diagnose the most common sprawl issues such as idle
VMs - those VMs that have been powered on, consuming storage and compute sources
but are actually not being used or not being logged into.
Two issues such as stale VMs - VMs that have been powered off or suspended for
extended periods of time using valuable storage resources.
This also extends to what we call right-sizing.
So how can I diagnose those VMs that are maybe over-allocated or even
under-allocated in resources
so that I can potentially free up resources that could be redeployed?
Virtualization manager provides you with actionable recommendations to right-size
your VMs. From the Sprawl dashboard, we can quickly drill down. So for example, if I
wanted to find the stale VMs in my environment and track them over time, I can
also launch into a search to find those stale VMs right now.
So, here we can see that we have around 27 VMs that have not been powered on
on for more than 30 days. Because Virtualization Manager is built on a
powerful search-based interface, I could very easily change that to be
90 days so that now I could find all the virtual machines in my environment that nobody has
used for more than ninety days. From here it's possible for me to generate an adhoc
report or what we call a data export. So I could share this report with my manager or
schedule it even on a weekly basis.
In this case, I’m going to use a preexisting template
to report on sprawl-related properties for this virtual machine.
If I run the report,
I'd call it my VM sprawl report.
I'll be taken to a screen where I'm actually able to schedule this report on a
recurring basis
so that I can proactively get on top of VM sprawl
and make sure the problem doesn't get too big in my environment.
Likewise, many of the best practice alerts out-of-the-box with
Virtualization Manager will alert you to sprawl when it's running into serious
threshold in your environment.
As you can see, Virtualization Manager provides you with a wealth of
resources in order to diagnose and prevent VM sprawl in your environment. Virtualization
Manager can be downloaded from SolarWinds.com and it's a simple virtual
appliance deployment so that you can be up and running within sixty minutes.