A group of Hewlett-Packards staff members, coordinated by Nick van der Zweep, director of Industry Standard Servers and Software at HP, have created created a list of strategies they contend can rid a data center of "virtual machine ghosts." A virtual ghost is a VM that has been created, may or may not have run an application, and then was either forgotten about, marginalized, or abandoned. This is happening more often than many people think, due mainly to the unending pileup of data to be processed in data centers. New management software has made it much easier to create VMs, which has unleashed this "paranormal activity." Often these VMs are created in batches, which doesn’t help mitigate the ghost issue. These masked resources are left to lurk in the data center. Now HP contends that they scare IT administrators with the amount of time required to manage them and money that they bleed from the budget. They contribute mightily to the growing concern about IT sprawl, which prevents companies from keeping up with their business requirements and making the most of their current investments.  – …