the curse of machine sprawl

In yesterday's post, I briefly touched on machine sprawl, and the irony that VMWare had basically solved the hardware machine sprawl of x86 servers through consolidation, only to accelerate machine sprawl as a whole with VMs. While the reason is obvious, the consequences may actually be worse than the hardware sprawl. Prior to 2000, Windows was not allowed on the raised floor as it was far too unreliable. While still unreliable (but less so at that point), Windows 2000 servers began to find their way onto the raised floor of the data center. This was due to economics – they were simply so cheap and easy to deploy that many business opportunities could now be pursued at a very low cost. Thus, they began to multiply like the Tribbles from the original Star Trek series who seemed to endear themselves to every sentient race which encountered them (except Klingons and Romulans of course).

The fact that VMs are now multiplying even faster than the windows servers a few years back is becoming a serious threat to the overall stability of IT. Part of my rationale is based on the inability of current systems management software to deal with dynamic environments, and the other is based on the now pressing need to re-invent the best practices defined by ITIL to accommodate virtual environments. Because VMs are viewed as cheap and easy to deploy, businesses are deploying them at an accelerating rate. Although VMWare is fairly expensive at over $1000/socket, there are new inexpensive (even free) virtual server environments on the horizon that may eliminate that cost, coming from M$ and others (see "ProxMox: The high-performance virtualization server for the rest of us"). This will only add fuel to the fire, overwhelming our already overworked and understaffed IT support staffs resulting in less stable environments.