Embotics V-Commander 2.0

Management of virtualized resources appears to loom large in the thoughts of suppliers. The most recent supplier to present their view of how to regain control of the environment is Embotics. The company's V-Commander V2.0 was the topic of the day. Embotics insists that this product will help organizations with the following challenges:

• Deal with the fact that servers are now virtual. They can be created very easily and move from place to place in the datacenter.
• Mission creep - many organizations deployed virtual machine software to consolidate functions and reduce costs. Now, these organizations are thinking of this tool as the foundation of a datacenter architecture.
• Tools, tools and more tools. Organizations have tools to manage systems, applications, development and deployment tools and, now, have one more layer to worry about

Embotics would pose that these issues would result in organizations facing the development, testing and deployment of more manual processes and, as an added bonus, the possibility of an unplanned and unmanagable proliferation of virtual systems. Embotics V-Commander 2.0 is the perfect tool to re-gain control of the datacenter, according to Embotics.

What does V-Commander do?

Here's how Embotics describes V-Commander:

Using no drivers or agents, V-Commander™ is an unintrusive, centralized, policy-based, VM lifecycle management system.

• Prevents V-Sprawl by automatically identifying, tracking, managing and controlling virtual machines throughout their lifecycle.
• Automates VM managemetn and policy enforcement
• Integrates the management of the virtual environment into traditional datacenter managfement systems

Embotics would go on to assert that the use of their product would provide organizations an automated control and management system that would reduce risk, provide beter levels of insight and audit-ability and enable administration staff to manage virtual environments by exception rather than by continued manual effort.

What's new?

Embotics would point out that V-Commander 1.0 has been in the field since December 2007 and has been successfully deployed by many organizations. Based upon the input coming from the installed base, the following enhancements were made:

• policy management: expanded zoning to group virtual machines, policy driven reclamation of expired virtual machines, new policy actions (remove virtual machine from inventory and delete virtual machine from disk) and new policy triggers.
• reporting: improved dashboard to simplify administration, up to 50 custom and default attributes can be assigned to virtual machines making it easier to group virtual machines for reporting purposes and expanded reporting capability
• Enterprise feataures: Active Directory authentication, stronger virtual machine tagging, built in repository, expanded group management capabilities, additional links to VMware's VirtualCenter and worksheets to assist in the process of installation and configuration.

Snapshot analysis

Management of virtualized resources must be an exciting opportunity suppliers such as VMware, Citrix, IBM, HP, Novell and many, many others have stepped forward with products. Suppliers such as Racemi, Surgient, Fortisphere, Qumranet, VMlogix, have focused on the same set of issues and challenges and have brought out competitive products.

Once IT decision makers learn of Embotics, they'll discover that V-Commander appears to be very easy to use and offers a great deal of power for adminitrators. The key question is will they discover Embotics. If the Embotics customers I've spoken to are to be believed, organizations would be well advised to seek out the company and see a demo.

One thing is clear to me, there's lots of excitment in this area.