1 Managing Virtual Machine Sprawl

Author: Barnali Ganesh

Table of Contents

1. Abstarct
2. Virtual Machine sprawl
3. Colama: Coriolis solution for Virtual Machine Sprawl
4. Coriolis offerings

Abstract

Virtualization is fast becoming an accepted standard for the IT infrastructure. While it

comes as a boon to the development and QA communities, the IT practitioners are
dealing with the pressing issue of virtual machine sprawl that surfaces due to adhoc and
hence uncontrolled adoption of virtualization. While describing the problem and its
effects, this paper outlines a solution called Colama, as offered by Coriolis Technologies.

Virtual Machine Sprawl

Virtual machines have been slipping in under the covers everywhere in the IT industry.
Software developers like virtual machines because they can easily mimic a target
environment. QA engineers prefer virtual machines because they can simultaneously test
the software on different configurations. Support engineers can ensure reproducibility of
an issue by pointing to an entire machine rather than detailing on the individual steps
and/or configuration requirement on a physical host. In many cases, adoption of virtual
machines has been primarily driven by users' choice rather than any coherent corporate
strategy. The ad-hoc and uncontrolled use of virtual machines across the organization has
resulted in to a problem called Virtual Machine sprawl, which has become critical for
today's IT administrators.

Virtual machine sprawl is an unpleasant side effect of server virtualization and its near
exponential growth over the years. Here are the symptoms:

At any given point, the virtual machines running in the organization are un-
accounted for. Information like who created them and when, who used them, what
configuration/s they have, what licensed software they use, whether security patches have
been applied, whether the data is backed up etc are not maintained and tracked anywhere.
Most commonly, people freely copy each other's virtual machines and no usage
tracking and access control is in place.
Because of cheap storage, too many identical or similar copies of the same machines
are floating across the organization. But reduction in storage cost does not reduce the
operational cost of storage management, search, backup, etc. Data duplication and
redundancy is a problem even if storage is plentiful.
Because there is no mechanism to keep track of why an image was created, it is hard
to figure out when it should be destroyed. People tend to forget what each image was
created for, and keep them around just in case they are needed. This increases the storage
requirements.
Licensing implications: Virtual machine copied from one with a licensed (limited)
software needs to tracked for its life span in order to put a control on the use of licensed
software.

Colama: Coriolis' solution for Virtual Machine Sprawl

There are many players in the industry who address this problem. Most of the virtual lab
management products are tied to one specific virtualization technology. For example, the
VMWare Lab Manager works for only VMWare virtualization technology. In a
heterogeneous virtualization environment that is filled with Xen, VMWare, VirtualBox
and Microsoft virtual machines, such an approach falls short.

Colama is Coriolis Technologies solution to address this problem. Colama manages the
life cycle of virtual machines across an organization. While tracking and virtual
machines, Colama is agnostic to the virtualization technology.

Here are some of the features of Colama:

Basic SCM for virtual machine: You can Checkin/checkout/clone/tag/comment

virtual machine/s for tracking revisions of virtual machine.
Image inspection: Colama provides automatic inspection, extraction and display of
image-related data, like OS version, software installed, etc and also facilitates "search" on
the extracted data. For example, you can search for the virtual machines that have got
Windows 2003 server with service pack 4 and Oracle 10g installed!
Web based interface: Navigate through the virtual machine repository of your
organization using just a web browser.
Ownership and access control: • Create a copy of a machine for yourself and decide
who can use "your" machine.
De-duplication: Copying/Cloning virtual machines happens without any additional
storage requirement.
Physical machine provisioning (lab management): Spawn a virtual machine of your
choice on a physical host available and 'ready'.
Management reports: auditing and compliance User activity reports, virtual
machine history, health information (up/down time) of virtual machines, license reports
of the virtual machines etc.
Virtualization agnostic: works for virtual machines from all known vendors.

Colama: Coriolis' offerings for Colama

Here is what Coriolis offers for Colama:

 Licensed copy of the product
Deployment services: Coriolis team set up virtual labs for their customers. Colama is
used as the virtual lab management software.
Training and deployment: Coriolis offers training for using virtual labs. The training
is followed by the actual deployment. This is particularly useful for the cases when a
corporate policy on virtualization is on the way.