Embotic V-Commander 3

After dealing with the increasingly typical file format blues, David Lynch of Embotics and I had the opportunity to review the important details of the launch of version three of V-Commander, Embotics management tool for virtualized environments. I've spoken with David in the past (see Embotics V-Commander 2.0 and Challenges of lifecycle management of virtual systems) and always enjoy our conversations.

Here's what Embotics is saying about V-Commander 3.0

Decrease the cost and administrative load of your virtual environments while improving the efficiency and consistency of your operation with V-Commander, enabling safe and sustainable growth; minimizing incidents, reducing complexity and increasing the return on your virtualization dollar.

• Gain insight and report in real-time, across all your virtualized environments with automatic discovery and Inventory Management; the resulting analysis and understanding is the fundamental first step in managing virtualization's complexity and risks.
• Control virtualized environments through VM policies, which can logically separate or group VMs, identify invisible VMs, control unauthorized or out of process VMs, as well as detecting sprawled resources that can be reclaimed, thereby reducing cost, risk and improving utilization.
• Automate actions, significantly reducing administrative effort, simplifying audit and compliance and enabling staff to focus on exceptions rather than the norm.
• Integrate and broker management information for traditional data center management systems, allowing them to effectively manage your virtualized environments, which leverages existing staff skills and training and reduces the burden of new technology introduction.

Snapshot analysis

As one would expect, Embotics faces strong competition in the market for management tools for virtualized environments. Citrix, DynamicOPS, Fortisphere, Microsoft, VDIworks, VMware and quite a few more are offering entries into this market. What's an IT decision maker to do? Pulling out one's hair is only going to start a buzz in the office.

What's clear to me is that it is best to start with what's actually needed in a organization's own IT environment and refine the search based upon those requirements. Embotics V-commander appears to be a very flexible, low cost option that could immediately bring positive results in the right environments.

It is also clear that if one can't find all of the organization's virtual machines, it is really hard to manage them.