Virtualization management tools broaden in scope to meet maturing demands
As virtual servers mature intro true enterprise platforms, so too must the virtualization management tools that sprang to life in this technology’s earliest days.
That will have virtualization management vendors looking both backwards and forwards as they strategize as to where next to take their tools, says Cameron Haight, research vice president, IT operations management, at Gartner.
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“Once again, we’ll see an increased focus on automation but now instead of lifecycle management the focus will be on self-service. Plus, we’ll see a focus on new requirements like service catalogs and chargeback mechanisms,” he says.
Embotics, for example, has once again broadened the scope of its virtualization management suite, V-Commander, with version 3.7 — available now. Enhancing the self-service capabilities was one of the company’s emphases in prepping the new release, says Jason Cowie, vice president of product management for Embotics.
“What we find among customers as they start accelerating their adoptions is an imperative to standardize the VM request and provisioning processes across the organization,” says Cowie, noting that many IT organizations still handle such requests via phone calls, e-mails or through the same processes they use for physical machines.
With this latest V-Commander release, IT managers can deliver customizable forms that “let end users request VMs in a safe, secure and fully audited fashion through the self-service portal and interface and integrate into back-end IT service management systems,” Cowie says.
In addition, Embotics now offers a plug-in to VMware’s vCenter virtualization management platform. “This allows us to configuration and change management data from V-Commander as well as to set and tag VMs at the point of creation and marry that right within vCenter,” he says.
And, beyond framework integration, V-Commander 3.7 includes enhanced capacity and performance management capabilities, with one aim being the ability to help IT organizations right-size their virtualization environments.
“With Embotics you’ll now find automation, lifecycle management, self-service provisioning, performance bottleneck analysis reports, configuration and compliance management capabilities — it’s trying to meet the needs of various stakeholders through a common packaging mechanism,” Haight says.
And it’s certainly not alone in taking this approach, he adds, noting as one other example Quest Software (formerly Vizioncore).
V-Commander 3.7 is available now. It’s priced at $299 per host CPU.
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