Managing virtualization sprawl

As an administrator of a virtual infrastructure, you want to know the state of the virtual machines in your environment at any given time. With BMC Server Automation, you can discover the virtual infrastructure inventory, and identify any virtual machines or zones that are contributing to virtualization sprawl.

Virtualization sprawl is an uncontrolled growth of virtual systems, which leads to un-managed virtual systems that consume IT resources without being productive systems (for example, a virtual machine which is no longer associated with a host server, but still exists on the datastore).

You can run a Virtual Infrastructure Discovery Job to query the virtual environment for existing virtual machines. If the discovered virtual assets are not already enrolled in the inventory, you can choose to auto-enroll them by selecting an option in the Job configuration.

Running the Virtual Infrastructure Discovery Job enables you to see what the virtual inventory looks like, without having to manually find and register each virtual asset. Being able to manage this inventory effectively enables you to control resource waste and optimize the use of the available hardware.

• See About the Virtual Infrastructure Discovery Job for pre-requisites and recommendations for running the job.

• See Creating the Virtual Infrastructure Discovery Job for instructions about creating the job.

• See the following topics discuss how to create a properties mapping file for the lifecycle properties and lists the extended server properties that are used to populate the BMC BladeLogic Decision Support for Server Automation reports:
  • Creating the server lifecycle properties mapping file
  • Generating reports for virtualization