V-Commander Comes to the Cloud
For a small to medium-sized business wanting to install automated virtualisation, i.e. a virtual machine, the huge cost of doing so will probably put most off the idea. To make such a big investment in, for example, VMware’s vSphere or vCloud Director would be very hard to justify, let alone see a return on your investment. Enter Embotics and their V-Commander Cloud Edition, a cost effective way to manage and deploy your virtual machines.
V-Commander 4.0 Cloud Edition, Embotics private cloud management solution, provides users with a self-service portal and service catalogue enabling control, reduces manual processing and lead times, increase resource utilisation via integrated capacity and performance planning, sprawl detection and reclamation policies, boost VM-to-admin ratios, and increase the quality of service via delegated activity.
Embotics recently slowed down their support developed for Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor so that they could concentrate on extending V-Commander for the cloud, directly targeting the vCloud for small and medium-sized businesses. Jason Cowie, Vice President of Marketing at Embotics, said, “WMware built an infrastructure that is very deep, but it is expensive and overkill for mid-range companies.”
The updated software has been enhanced with a range of features, meetings customers’ requirements, including IT costing and chargeback, self-service provisioning, compliance and governance, automation and orchestration, and collaboration, all of which move V-Commander into the private cloud automation sphere. Although previous versions of V-Commander had the chargeback feature, the Cloud Edition pushes the chargeback data into the new service catalogue so that employees requesting VM resources can compare resources and visualise their effect, prior to committing IT to those resources.
The added request management system manages the workflow as a VM request proceeds through the approval process, and tracks how quickly it is approved or denied, enabling transparency. V-Commander also includes “intelligent replacement”, a wizard-driven, rapid provisioning system of VMs onto hypervisors and other physical servers.
With the added benefits of an API stack that allows system management frameworks to feed data into V-Commander and vice versa, that can also search the network for ESXi-compatible VMs, tag them, track them and rightsize them, and being a Windows-based server, it can reach into VMware’s vCentre console.
Aston University in Birmingham recently trialled Embotics’s V-Commander 4.0 Cloud Edition with great success. They were looking for a solution whereby they could handle capacity and performance management, as well as automated chargeback, for their 250 virtual machines (VMs) that was affordable and manageable. Steve Goodman, Senior Server Engineer at Aston University, said, “We had more customers who preferred to buy virtual machines through our cloud service rather than buying physical servers, the ongoing management of billing them was a paper-based process backed up by spreadsheets. It was becoming quite a burden to manage that.”
Key areas of consideration when deciding on a solution were the chargeback capability, the service catalogue and automation of the provisioning. Steve Goodman continues, “Instead of providing a web-based document that says what we provide, we can move all our VM templates into a catalogue, the users can select them, and the provisioning process is simple. The value really comes from time savings for the IT team, because we don’t have to do the manual provisioning work.”
Written by: Allie Philpin