Please don't hug the servers

Virtual servers are not free, but some users are treating them that way. It's so easy and inexpensive to provision new virtual servers these days that users are asking for them for all sorts of temporary applications - and then not telling anyone when they're done with them. At one point the practice became common enough at Qualcomm that IT jokingly coined a term for people who were sitting on idle virtual server capacity: Server huggers.

While the term sounds funny, the problem isn't, particularly as a virtual server farm scales into thousands of virtual machines. Here's how it can happen, says Paul Poppleton, senior staff engineer at Qualcomm. A business unit manager might request several servers for testing applications, but then forgets about them - or decides to keep the idle virtual servers when he's done, just in case he needs them for something else down the road. Because virtual servers can be provisioned so quickly and inexpensively, idle, abandoned or forgotten virtual servers can add up even more quickly than did orphaned physical servers.

Just how big are the resource implications? Consider this: Over five years Qualcomm's virtual server farm has grown to 4,000 virtual servers. During the same time it reclaimed 4,500 virtual machines. Had it not been watching virtual server use, Qualcom's IT operation could conceivably have been managing twice as many virtual servers, more than half of which would be idle. That's why today when a user requests a virtual server at Qualcomm they must state whether or not the server is permanent - and IT follows up.

Poppleton has more than five years of nuts and bolts experience to share about scaling a virtual server infrastructure. He will be joining me on Wednesday, October 22nd for an online panel discussion entitled "Virtualization Gotchas" - and you're invited. The discussion is, aptly enough, part of Computerworld's virtual trade show, called Virtual Directions, so you don't have to travel to be there. You just sign up by clicking here.

Scaling up with virtualization? Paul and our other panelists will be starting at 1:15 p.m. Eastern time - and we'll leave plenty of time for your questions. I hope you can join us.