For most companies the cost to manually reclaim inactive resource outweighs the benefit of reclaiming those resources. What are your inefficient manual processes costing your company?
One of the biggest problems with reclaiming inactive resources is simply the identification of inactive machines. For most companies, this is a manual process consisting of data 
collection scripts and spreadsheets. Even companies that have invested in reporting software to help identify these inactive machines often encounter yet another problem, which is filtering out truly inactive machines from those that appear to be inactive. Some machines may meet several criteria that causes them to appear in an inactive exception report, yet are known to be machines required for the business. If a large percentage of these essential machines show up on an exception report, the reports become ineffective because administrators can’t see the problem machines through the clutter. This identification issue reveals a recycling problem, which is how to validate that a virtual machine is truly inactive by confirming with the owner and automating the reclamation process. Report-only solutions are of little help here as they were not around when the machine was created. Therefore, they do not know who the owner is and without an automation process to help verify the machine is no longer needed, they can’t initiate the process to recycle the inactive machine’s resources. For most companies, the time and effort required to perform manual reclamation far outweighs the anticipated capital savings benefit to the point where it is rarely performed.
Let’s take our 1,000 Virtual machine customer with 10% of their machines inactive as an example. In Part 1 of this series we showed these inactive machines were costing them over $120,000 annually in additional capital expenses. On average this customer spends 3 hours per machine to identify, notify, track, re-notify, etc. before they can reclaim and inactive resource. To reclaim 10% of their resources or 100 machines would take 37 person days every time they wanted to perform this task. Although the $120,000 in CapEx savings probably justifies the $17,000 in OpEx expenses, most companies just don’t have the extra operations staff to reclaim these resources more than once a year if at all. Like to learn more about automated resource reclamation, check out Part 3 – Using vCloud Automation Center to Recover Inactive Resources (available shortly).
Learn more about vCloud Automation Center and how automating cloud service delivery can cut cost while accelerating access to IT applications and resources.
- Watch the vCloud Automation Center Overview video (2:30 min)
- See how VMware IT saved 90% of time spent and 30% of costs through automated provisioning.
- Check out what some of our customers are saying in the customer case studies on our web site.
Need help deploying your private cloud infrastructure or developing your business justification? Contact us and our experts can help your team build the business case and the solution that will maximize your IT productivity. Follow us on Twitter: @vmwarecloudauto. Subscribe to the VMware IT Management blog for exclusive content and updates.
Need help deploying your private cloud infrastructure or developing your business justification? Contact us and our experts can help your team build the business case and the solution to maximize your IT productivity.
For exclusive content and updates, follow us on Twitter @vmwarecloudauto and subscribe to our VMware IT Management blog.
