Top 4 Areas to Optimize Your Cloud Spend

Cloud servers are easy to provision and configure. Maybe too easy. That’s why many organizations are finding their cloud spend spiraling out of control. If you have recently experienced shock and awe at your monthly cloud bill, you may need to examine your environment for optimization opportunities.

Here are four of the top areas to reduce your cloud sprawl, and by extension, your cloud spend.

Overprovisioning

While it may be simplest to set up your cloud environment at the maximum resource levels you’ll need for peak usage, this is the fastest way to rack up unnecessary charges. Part of the appeal of the cloud is being able to add additional resources on demand, so take advantage of resource monitoring and capacity planning to rightsize your VMs. This may take a few cycles of experimentation, but eventually you’ll hit a sweet spot that provides the performance you need even for minor peaks while still avoiding overprovisioning.

If you start to experience a resource crunch and VMs are failing, vCloud does include Hot Add features to provision additional CPU or memory for individual or grouped VMs. There are limitations to this however, so be sure to read about what is and isn’t possible when using Hot Add. If your cloud is not VMware-based, you may be able to set up autoprovisioning features.

Orphaned Storage

Most every VMware user eventually runs into the problem of orphaned VMDK files, or unused virtual machine storage disks that are consuming space — and therefore cloud budget — while not being actively used by a VM. VMDKs do not have any indication of which, if any, VMs are using it, so once your environment reaches a certain scale they can be difficult to locate.

Old snapshots can also consume valuable storage space. If you’ve snapshotted a VM more recently than an older snapshot, chances are you don’t need to save it. There are exceptions in the case of requiring multiple versions of backups, but eventually you’ll reach a state of snapshot clutter that isn’t sustainable for your budget.

There are freeware tools like RVTools that can help you find orphaned VMDK files and old snapshots. Be sure to also train your administrators to remove virtual disks when old VMs are decommissioned.