Virtualization is spreading like a prairie fire through the data center, leaving behind a proliferation of unused and forgotten virtual machines that no one takes responsibility for or decommissions.

Virtual servers are easy to create--anyone with a little bit of experience can do it--and since they are software files, they can easily fade into the background. With VMs, it's "easier to lose track of things and easier to create more complexity and variety than you really need," says Forrester Research analyst Frank Gillett.

Now VMware is providing a tool to generate a virtual infrastructure that will give customers a way to track virtual machines. VMware Lifecycle Manager requires users to provide a decommissioning date when the VM is set up, says Bogomil Balkansky, VMware's senior marketing manager. The VM doesn't go away on that date, but Lifecycle Manager prods an administrator to query the user as to whether the VM is still in use. If not, it gets archived on disk and its CPU, memory, and disk requirements are reassigned to another virtual server, Balkansky says.

Lifecycle Manager, priced at $895 per server CPU socket, also can be used to track who requested a VM, who approved it, where it's deployed, and how long it's been in operation. IT staff can then assign chargeback measures based on the type of resources it uses and its real cost to the data center.

But the main reason to implement some form of VM management, Gillett says, is to automate manual tasks that are prone to error when done repeatedly. VM management also lets administrators establish a few standardized virtual servers and match the appropriate one to what a user needs. Variations cloned from a known standard server cause less confusion than when a lot of one-off versions are generated.

"Virtualization saves you money on the gear, but the real win is augmenting labor and eliminating mistakes," Gillett says.

In addition, VMware's life-cycle manager provides a catalog of standard IT services, letting users select from a predetermined menu the virtual machine with the properties they want. It provides a process that submits a VM request to the proper approver, making it more likely that the correct policies will govern its creation and use. It also has a Web interface that lets administrators track deployments without being on site.

NOT ENOUGH
Lifecycle Manager is "a good first step but doesn't go far enough," says Andi Mann, virtualization consultant at Enterprise Management Associates, an IT consulting firm. It only manages VMs generated by VMware Server and VMware's ESX Server, not those generated by Citrix Systems' XenServer, open source Xen, or Microsoft's upcoming Hyper-V hypervisor. "Ninety-five percent of enterprises are going to have more than one kind of virtual machine running," Mann says.

VMware's manager isn't alone in focusing on automating VM management. Citrix, which recently bought XenSource, and Virtual Iron both have similar products. Startups--such as Embotics, with its V-Commander; Veeam, with Veeam Reporter; and Nimsoft, with NimBus for VMware Monitoring--are more specialized, managing pieces of the virtual infrastructure.

But Gillett says most IT departments aren't going to want to "cobble together" solutions from different vendors. In the long run, the vendor whose product encompasses and automates many aspects of the VM infrastructure in one management interface will have the advantage.