We are already seeing the "VM Sprawl" here. We have enough management utilities in-house to get by for now. I am looking forward to more mature virtualization-management utilities to become available in the future. As with any new technology - the 3rd party stuff comes afterwards (The horse before tha cart and not the cart before the horse).

DB

Yes, we have a number of projects that our folks are working on that are resulting in VM sprawl. Only recently have I started seeing success in my education efforts with managers of other deparments. The focus of the training attempts to explain that just because we have a glut of resources thanks to ESX, we do not have a free ticket to start using virtual servers as organizational containers.

Why are non-IT people making IT decisions, you ask? That is a subject for another time, my friends.

The ease of creating VMs can lead to "VM Sprawl" We require a cost center be provided with every VM request, and all requests require the requestors manager approval. This has helped cut down on unnecessary VM requests.
The bright side is VM sprawl is much easier to deal with than physical server sprawl. And we would rather have developers have a few too many VMs than to go back to stacking up old desktops in their cubes.

I've always said that VMware is the crack cocaine of the software world. Give people a taste and they're hooked.

I know this is a crude analogy, but it's true. Creating VM's becomes so easy and inexpensive that customers go nut adding VM's.

Alex

http://www.vi411.org/