Embotics V-Scout

By the time you read this, I should be winging my way out to the Citrix event. I hope to post on what a learn there in the coming days.

I had the chance to speak once again with David Lynch of Embotics. As usual, the conversation was interesting and informative. If you're keeping tabs, Embotics has been the victim, err subject, of previous posts including Embotics V-Commander 2.0 and Challenges of lifecycle management of virtual systems. This time the topic of conversation was Embotic's V-Scout.

Here's what Embotics has to say about V-Scout

• Embotics V-Scout™ is a free, agent-less, centralized insight tool for VMware environments
• Intended for the VM administrator, Embotics V-Scout replaces commonly used tracking spreadsheets, providing automatic insight into the VM environment, and the ability to quickly and easily generate almost any report needed.
• Deployed in minutes it automatically populates data in real-time across multiple VirtualCenters, providing:
  • Population reports,  with historical trending & costing information.
  • Custom fields, allowing users to associate any information to them  (i.e. business owner, department, Application, Expiry date, project name, cost center etc.).
  • Automatic inheritance of Custom fields
  • The built-in reporting capability then allows fast and easy generation of reports on any of these custom attributes.

Snapshot Analysis

V-Scout is a "try-it-you'll-buy-it" product based upon Embotics' V-Commander technology. It is a free download that offers, in a limited form, the power of V-Commander. Embotics hopes that organizations will download the software, try it out on a few systems in their datacenters and then see that they need to purchase the full-blown product. This approach has been very successfully used by MySQL, SugarCRM and a number of other suppliers. Embotics hopes that it will work for them as well.

Embotics faces quite a complex, challenging environment, however. Management of virtualized environments is quite a crowded market. Embotics faces the challenge of getting through the noise of other vendors doing what appears to be similar things and using very similar lanaguage.

Fortisphere (see yesterday's post), for example, presents a fairly similar message and appears to have equally powerful technology.

I would advise getting a demo of both company's products and deciding for yourself which fits your needs better.