CommVault announces VM Archiving to eliminate VM sprawl

A common problem across many of today’s virtual infrastructures is the waste of resources due to the phenomenon known as VM sprawl.

Virtualization has created tremendous levels of flexibility in today’s modern data center. However, because it’s so easy to provision new virtual machines, many organizations are experiencing the unintended consequence of that flexibility. VM sprawl is the proliferation of virtual machines, many of which were created for short-term use, then later forgotten and left to become orphaned or zombie virtual machines.

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Almost every VMware environment struggles with VM sprawl to some extent, and as such are wasting precious and costly computing and storage resources that could be repurposed to other virtual machines or applications. But some administrators are reluctant to delete virtual machines out of fear they might be needed again someday — which sounds a bit like virtual machine hoarding, doesn’t it? While this is a known problem across virtualization circles, it’s a problem that never seems to get resolved.

Announced just ahead of VMworld, CommVault, a data storage software company, introduced a new virtual machine archiving capability aimed at helping virtualized enterprises and service providers tackle VM sprawl.

While a number of specific tools and management software products currently on the market address this very problem, many of them are simply reporting tools that identify problem areas where an administrator should take action. But CommVault seems to be taking a different approach to solving this issue by integrating it into their existing Simpana software platform.

What’s interesting and unique about this is that as a backup and recovery tool, CommVault has visibility into all of the data under management. This allows the software to identify those virtual machine disk files that have been sitting idle, then automatically kick off customizable, policy-driven process to eliminate those stale or orphaned virtual machines causing VM sprawl.

The company claims its VM Archiving feature is an “industry first” in that it aims to rein in the problem through intelligent archiving. As a bonus, VM Archiving is being made available at no additional cost to those customers already using CommVault to protect their VMware environments.

David West, CommVault’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing and business development, says VM sprawl is an increasingly complex issue, especially in large data centers. West adds that users can reclaim wasted resources, save money, and free up primary storage capacity by using CommVault’s latest feature.

“The ability to automatically archive underutilized VMs as part of the Simpana 10 platform provides huge cost savings and efficiency and is a key strategy for enterprises on their journey to modern data management,” says West. “Wasted VMs can have a major impact on costs, which is where the new VM Archiving functionality comes in to automatically identify, power down, relocate, archive, and recover inactive virtual machines in VMware vSphere environments.”

Other products may move the data, but they typically only make copies and often require manual labor. Even then, they aren’t truly archiving the virtual machines. Simpana VM Archiving, on the other hand, incorporates traditional backup and virtual machine archiving in a single operation for VMware vSphere environments.

This new technology enables a host of new and interesting features:

• Using administrator-defined policies, VM Archiving functionality can find, relocate, and retire stale or orphaned virtual machines that are inactive during the backup process to enable increased administrative control.
• The solution also lets administrators set parameters for automatic management of virtual resources and expiration criteria based on CPU, network, and disk usage. Once configured, archiving can be performed as part of the normal backup cycle.
• The software can also migrate powered-off virtual machines from Tier 1 storage to more cost-efficient, longer retention tier storage, such as tape, local disk, or storage in the cloud.
• It can also quickly recover archived virtual machines using a stub (marker) in VMware vCenter, which removes the risks associated with deleting virtual machines to eliminate VM sprawl.

CommVault is currently demonstrating its new VM Archiving solution along with its recently released Simpana 10 platform at VMworld 2013 taking place this week in San Francisco. If you want to see it firsthand and in action, you can check it out at their booth. And while you are at it, check out these other five vendors at VMworld.

You can also keep up with live coverage of VMworld 2013 by following me on Twitter at @vmblogcom. Please find me at the show and say hello.

This article, “CommVault announces VM Archiving to eliminate VM sprawl,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com.