Solving virtual machine sprawl

CommVault has announced the industry's first virtual machine (VM) intelligent archiving capability to help enterprises and service providers eliminate VM sprawl and regain control of virtual infrastructure resources.

VM sprawl results from pervasive deployment and growth of virtual machines, some of which then sit unutilised long after their useful lives. CommVault Simpana VM Archiving reclaims idle virtual host and shared storage resources by automatically managing and moving unused VMs to cost effective storage, with the ability to instantly recover archived VMs, for increased utilisation, efficiency and savings.

Available at no additional cost to customers using Simpana 10 software for virtual server protection, VM Archiving is integrated with CommVault’s singular software platform, which enables users to instantly deploy, protect and archive virtual and physical servers from a single management console. The new intelligent archive capability is a key component of CommVault’s modern data management approach to continuously address operational and protection concerns in virtualised and infrastructure-as-a-service environments. CommVault will demonstrate Simpana 10 with VM Archiving at VMworld 2013 in San Francisco from August 25-29, 2013.

“Enterprises have many options to deploy resources in a virtualised data centre or cloud, but require a better way to protect this environment and create more value from the data it manages,” said David West, senior vice president, worldwide marketing and business development, CommVault. “VM sprawl is an increasingly common and complex issue, especially in large infrastructures. The ability to automatically archive underutilised 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."

Reining in VM Sprawl Increases Virtual Infrastructure Utilisation, Cuts Costs
VM Archiving is a comprehensive solution that incorporates traditional backup and virtual machine archiving in a single operation for VMware vSphere environments. The Simpana 10 platform delivers scalable and resilient data protection in both physical and virtual environments from on-premise data centres to the cloud for enterprises and service providers.

Using administrator-defined policies, CommVault’s new VM Archiving functionality can automatically identify, power down, relocate, archive and recover inactive virtual machines in VMware vSphere environments, with the following innovations and benefits:
· Finds, relocates and retires stale or orphaned VMs during the backup process to enable increased administrative control; sets parameters for automatic management of virtual resources and expiration criteria based on CPU, network, and disk usage. Once configured, archiving is performed as part of the normal backup cycle.
· Increases utilisation and reduces storage hardware costs by automatically moving powered-off VMs from expensive Tier 1 disks to more cost efficient, longer retention tiers, either on disk or in the cloud, using VMware Storage vMotion. Relocated VMs can be archived at the same time or later.
· Streamlines testing and development operations by continually recycling compute, memory and shared storage resources in virtual hosts.
· Recovers archived VMs in a single step using a stub (marker) in VMware vCenter.
· Integrates with Simpana software’s Virtual Server Agent (VSA) for backup and recovery of virtual machines. Simpana VSA automatically manages hardware storage array snapshots for instant protection and recovery of virtualised applications, with built-in support for all the major storage arrays.
· Incorporates with Simpana 10 workflows to automate more complex, repetitive administrative tasks with drag-and-drop simplicity.