Embotics introduced a whitepaper describing the costs associated with virtual sprawl and suggestions on estimating the cost of sprawl in an enterprise environment. The nature of virtualization frequently leads to the misconception that virtual machines (VMs) have no real associated costs, despite the high costs associated with infrastructure, management, software and administration. The truth is that VMs have real costs similar to physical servers; and these costs increase with virtual sprawl. The costs of virtual sprawl take up budget, time and eventually require the purchase of more physical servers than needed. This can frequently negate the company?s return on investment which is the greatest benefit of virtualization.