V-Commander 3.7 Runs a Tight Ship
The long-standing, conventional wisdom has always been that when it comes to the IT market place, no one company can do it all. While this will probably always be true on some level, you have to give Embotics credit for taking a pretty full-featured shot at the do-it-all mantle with their newly unveiled V-Commander 3.7, which the company ambitiously claims provides end-to-end capabilities for managing virtual infrastructures and private clouds.
When I recently spoke with Jason Cowie, Embotics VP of Product Management, he enumerated a long list of V-Commander 3.7 capabilities, including embedded best practices via a self-service portal that standardizes VM requests; integration with vSphere and vCenter via a vCenter plug-in that enables real-time, system-wide management capabilities from the proverbial single pane of glass; and the ability to set expiration dates for VMs, which are never left alone to cause problems during their short stay here on Planet Earth. When their time is up, ZAP!, they are decommissioned and dismissed without prejudice.
Of course, these VMs can never be created in the first place if they fail to pass muster in terms of policy-based compliance requirements. Once they are up and running, V-Commander protects them like a mother lion guarding her cubs, ensuring, via the system's capacity management feature, that all virtual assets are evenly balanced and provisioned. If they become even a little off-kilter, a fine-tuning capability nudges them back to center.
Loathe though I be to reproduce or give comfort to canned analyst quotes, when the canned analyst is the redoubtable Gartner Research VP, Chris Wolf, I stand down. In his rather lengthy statement, he endorses Embotics' goals with V-Commander, and notes the importance to users of solutions that intelligently run the gamut of lifecycle requirements from provisioning to retirement. Chris goes on to declare, "Integrated marketing stories that represent numerous disjointed products no longer cut it. Our customers are demanding tightly integrated automation stacks to move forward with their cloud plans."
V-Commander--which is complementary to the VMware platform--costs $299 per host CPU socket.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/18/2011 at 12:48 PM