A new paper entitled "Controlling VM Sprawl" offers a new perspective on the growing use of virtual machines in the IT environment. Virtual machines are often used by software developers and beta testers, but more frequently, they're appearing in the production network environment, either deliberately, or without much thought.

This casual use of virtual machines may mean that network administrators are not always aware of the number, type of purpose of virtual machines running on their networks. This raises licensing, compliance and security issues. The paper's author, Anil Desai, recommends that virtual machine deployment should be looked at a similar risk level to deploying a physical server. Further, if an organization is just getting into virtual machine deployment, strict controls about the introduction of a virtual machine should be put into place.

Desai also indicates that there are a number of tools available to detect virtual machines running on a network, and query them to find additional virtual machines. Desai also recommends developing an end-of-life policy for virtual machines to avoid running them unattended and undetected for weeks or months after their purpose has been served.