Strategies to find under-utilized or abandoned VM's

[dcap]

Does anyone have a good suggestion on how to identify if a VM has been 'abandoned'? Look at resource usage to see if it is low or if the VM has been offline for a time period (i.e. 30, 60 or 90 days)?

[ablej]

If you are looking for an application, VMware Lifecycle Manager does a great job at finding abandoned VM's. If you just want to look at a few VM's, then if it is a Windows VM's we usually Check the security logs to see the last time someone logged into the VM. I am sure there are a lot of other ways to do this though

David Strebel

www.holy-vm.com

[williambishop]

I'm looking for the same thing right now....

[ablej]

You might want to look at vmSight they offer a free basic version which can monitor VM activity.

http://www.vmsight.com/solutions_vc.asp

David Strebel

www.holy-vm.com

[williambishop]

I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to install and manage another suite or complex buildout just to find what should be a simple query.

Damn, I need to go learn sql.

[ablej]

I totally agree William it would be a huge hassel for what should be a easy task. I am sure someone with scripting skills could manage to come up with something.

David Strebel

www.holy-vm.com

[dcap]

how does lifecycle manager determine if a VM is abandoned? Is it purely user login based or do they look at any utilization information and correlate that?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

However it is not really an easy task. Let's give a few examples..... Development VM is powered off for 60 days. They use it once every 60 days. Your tool would possibly find this VM.

Or, VM has trivial utilization but is running. This utilization is a mumble but the VM is running. Nothing in the database would tell you that this low utilized system is actually a very important system.

So you need to get a list of all VMs, you need to be able to find out who owns and therefore maintains those systems. Spreadsheets work but they do get laborious over time. List of VMs is fairly easy to get. THe other data is more important. Who owns the system, how often it runs, etc.

LifeCycle Manager is designed to answer these questions. You get to set lifespans on each VM and who is the owner, etc.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[dcap]

Seems like a big effort to deploy a provisioning/orchestration platform for this issue alone. I assume if LCM does this so do platforms like DynamicOps. Does Vizioncore, Fortisphere or ManageIQ do stuff like this or will CapacityIQ that was announced at VMworld tackle this?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Seems like a big effort to deploy a provisioning/orchestration platform for this issue alone. I assume if LCM does this so do platforms like DynamicOps. Does Vizioncore, Fortisphere or ManageIQ do stuff like this or will CapacityIQ that was announced at VMworld tackle this?

I have not seen anything from Vizioncore on this. But CapacityIQ is a bit in the future. The others, may have something. LCM does quite a bit of what you want and has quite a few bells and whistles that would help. THere are others out there I am sure. I know of one free tool as well.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[williambishop]

My preference would be to see the last login date(it keeps track of who attaches to them), if it's not been logged into in 60 days, it's defunct on the desktop side.

W

[dcap]

But what about the server side? Doesn't seem like login activity would be the sole metric but might be if it was coupled with some utilization trend? If my dev guys spin up a webserver and forget to spin it down I'm trying to figure out how to at least identify candidates (ones that already exist and unfortunately didn't have a lot of process/structure around them). I'm betting i have a big chunk of them out there and i'd like to find them.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

This is a very interesting problem. However, not easily solved. I would start with a spreadsheet with 4 columns.

Machine Use Owner Lifespan

If the Use or Owner is unknown then power it off. If the owner can give a lifespan, use this information to help decide when it should go out of commission.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[williambishop]

Most people only have a few hundred servers at most, which is not as big a problem. I have thousands of desktops however, and that is a problem. I estimate that right now, I've got 200 vm's that aren't in use. But short of going to each one to see the last login time, I don't have a way of determining.

On servers, different problems. Can't determine by low utilization, I've got criticals that might hover under 100mhz...but I need what they do. I can't go by login, because they are rarely logged into. Different problem entirely, where a lifecycle manager may be to advantage. It's not however in my desktop scenario, because what I need should be easy...I just don't know how to do it. When I don't have as much on my plate, I'll probably try to figure something out....But it will be a while.

W

[ablej]

VizionCore did announce their automation Suite at VMworld which included's workflow, policy and Lifecycle management software.

David Strebel

www.holy-vm.com

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful"

[williambishop · Accepted solution]

While vmsight is amazing, and I'm sure vizioncore is as well, I think we need something simple for such a simple task. When I get some time I'll see if I can't figure out how to extract this bit of info from the database itself. Last login time can't be that hard.

[vserverdude]

newScale also offers a virtual appliance that can help with this: www.newscale.com/vmware

It's available for download as a free trial, integrated with vCenter