New Embotics' capability boosts company's ability to provide customized access into virtual infrastructure
When Embotics, a virtual machine life-cycle management mainstay, updated its V-Commander tool this summer with a self-service portal that allows customizable views for different IT team members, Cablevision Systems was all over the upgrade.
When Embotics, a virtual machine life-cycle management mainstay, updated its V-Commander tool this summer with a self-service portal that allows customizable views for different IT team members, one cable TV operator was all over the upgrade.
“It’s why we went to 3.6,” says the lead systems engineer for the company, speaking of the latest version of V-Commander.
The ability to provide distinct views into the virtual infrastructure spurred along some overdue cleaning up of access control lists (ACL) at the company, the user says. “We’re in the process of tweaking rights and leveraging the portal, which gives us the ability to give our application support users one level of access and our business reporting users another,” he says.
“We’ve had ACL on our radar for a long time, and we could do that through [VMware] vCenter, but giving a virtual infrastructure client to the application support team gives those users too much area to poke around in and to see or ask about things they shouldn’t necessarily be seeing,” the user says. “The portal gives them much more of a slimmed-down Web interface than they’d get with the full vCenter client.”
Another plus of V-Commander 3.6 is support for the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, the user says. As Hyper-V, as well as Citrix XenServer, “start holding their weight,” the company is looking at how to use those products in production. They’re currently running within the company’s test-and-development environment, he adds.
Heterogeneous hypervisor support was a point of consideration when the company evaluated and selected the Embotics’ VM life-cycle manager roughly two years ago, the user says. “We wanted to be sure that not only could we manage VMs in the VMware infrastructure but if we had a lower-tier infrastructure that ran on Hyper-V that we’d be able to manage and report on it as well — and this enables us to do that,” he explains.
Since deploying V-Commander, the company has found considerable benefit in using the tool to set expiry dates on VMs, of which the user says the company has “fewer than a thousand but more than just a couple hundred,” with between 25% and 50% of its server infrastructure virtualized.
With V-Commander, the company can tag VMs with the date created and then add metadata to the machines and an expiry date. “Now on a monthly basis, we can review which machines will expire when, and can then approach the business about updating the VMs and switching the cost model from an upfront capital expense to an ongoing service type of expense for maintenance,” the user says.
Additional benefits, he adds, come from the tool’s ability to find orphaned VMs, which can eat up pricey storage space, and to run audit and trending reports.
What tools do you find most beneficial in managed your virtualization infrastructure. Share your story here.
Read more about data center in Network World’s Data Center section.
