Lab Management

Product brochure

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Lab ManagementAre you like the thousands of other people who wish they still had Lab Manager? As you now know, vCAC is not the lab management solution you hoped it would be.With Embotics® vCommander™ Cloud Management Software platform, you won’t be spending days configuring software—instead, you’ll be up and running in hours. Even better, you’ll have all the same Lab Manager features you’ve grown accustomed to, like fenced networking, virtual machine (VM) collaboration and sharing (à la Lab Manager LiveLink), organizations and quotas, and access to multiple consoles.

Furthermore, vCommander can coexist with your existing Lab Manager implementation, making for an easy evaluation and a smooth transition.

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BenefitsVirtual Lab Management & DevOpsDo you want to give your development and business unit teams the power to be self-sufficient without sacrificing control over your infrastructure? vCommander provides lab self-service.

vCommander automates virtual labs, manages test and development environments, enables DevOps processes and utilizes either your private data center or public clouds (such as Amazon, HP Public Cloud, and others). vCommander also enables end users to correlate performance and resource usage with what is actually happening on the VM, all without allowing a single user into vCenter or System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).

Provisioning Automation & Application DeploymentAre you looking to optimize your testing and development processes, reducing your time to market? Get automation working for you.

vCommander supports automated testing via its extensive REST API, allowing developers to automate the end-to-end delivery and continuous management of infrastructure and application services. Automatically check in builds to the vCommander service catalog, submit requests to provision workloads, and even share VMs that have failed an automated test cycle with a developer for triage and resolution—all from outside the vCommander application.

VM Sharing & CollaborationDo you want to increase development productivity by enabling easy sharing of virtual assets within the team? Collaboration within vCommander is effortless.

Provide sharing capabilities to your lab users, allowing them to share VMs with other users (equivalent to VMware Lab Manager LiveLink) or to request a copy of an existing VM. Lab users can also share VM ownership, so that multiple users can share administration duties. Don’t worry—you can set individual and organizational quotas and configure an approval process to keep sprawl at bay.

Fast, easy and affordableEmbotics vCommander is an easy-to-use, affordable, platform-neutral solution with the fastest time-to-value in the industry. Automate your lab in less than an hour.

Change user behaviorPresent rightsizing recommendations to your users in the service portal. Enable users to decide when their VMs are overprovisioned, instead of resource reductions being driven by IT.

Full-featured REST APIvCommander provides support for automated testing via a REST API, a self-service portal, and fast provisioning with linked clones.

Ease of configuration and usevCommander gives you the features and flexibility available in OpenStack, without requiring an army of developers to deploy it. Install vCommander in less than an hour and have a working service portal in less than a day. No coding experience is required.

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Quota ManagementProviding a software-defined data center for your users should be uncomplicated. vCommander provides a flexible model that’s easily tailored to your organization’s needs.

vCommander allows IT to create virtual data centers, empowering end users to manage their own VMs and services within predefined quotas for CPU, memory and disk. Administrators can assign quotas to IT-defined organizations, individuals, or a combination of both for maximum control. Approval workflows allow for multi-level approvals that can be triggered on cost, resource usage, or a combination.

FeaturesFlexible Workflows & Lifecycle ManagementUse vCommander’s built-in orchestration to automate approvals, provisioning, decommissioning and custom actions to reduce provisioning time, eliminate sprawl, and manage the lifecycle of virtual assets.

vCommander helps organizations by streamlining and automating the provisioning and decommissioning processes using policy-based rules. For example, your users can switch from owning virtual assets to leasing services that expire when a workload is no longer required. Gone are the days of tracking down the owner of a long-expired workload.

With its built-in orchestration engine and library of common workflow steps, vCommander can easily automate approvals for new workloads by performing provisioning steps, such as automatically joining a machine to a domain, and by executing applications in the guest OS.

With its extensible integration points, vCommander makes it easy to communicate with third-party applications and data sources so you can automate even the most challenging operations using simple PowerShell commands or the scripting language of your choice.

End User Self-Service & Distributed AdministrationvCommander enables personalized self-service for Lab and DevOps users through easily customizable service catalogs and an on-demand user portal. vCommander self-service empowers DevOps teams to get the most out of your private and public infrastructure.

Do your DevOps teams want to use public clouds such as Amazon Web Services? vCommander supports AWS provisioning side-by-side with your private infrastructure, allowing you to get control of external IT costs.

Do you wish you could allow your users to perform repetitive administration tasks themselves without letting them into vCenter? vCommander gives your users the power to manage their VMs with privileges that you define as an administrator, allowing them to complete simple tasks themselves while you focus on more important things.

Whatever your challenge, vCommander’s flexibility lets you configure custom automations and integrations to third-party request and ticketing systems to meet the demands of even your most demanding user community.

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Customer Facing RightsizingGet your users working with you instead of against you by showing them performance and cost recommendations for their VMs.

vCommander provides rightsizing recommendations to both the administrator and the end user, enabling users to decide when a VM is overprovisioned, instead of having resource reductions being driven by IT.

VM Power SchedulingThese days, running infrastructure in the public cloud can be costly. vCommander helps reduce your public cloud spending.

To help you save money, vCommander allows you to define power schedules for VMs that automatically power workloads off and on. vCommander makes it easy to control usage on public or private infrastructure.

On-Premises SolutionProvide a lab management solution without the security vulnerabilities of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. vCommander is a stand-alone application you can install quickly and securely in your data center.

Install vCommander in less than an hour. Lab administrators can also install the Embotics RDP and Console proxy appliance. The Console Proxy permits lab users to connect with their VMs over a secure connection, so that you can offer services over the Internet or other networks.

Network Fencing SupportvCommander allows administrators to optionally specify VMs to be deployed into Layer 2 / Layer 3 fenced networks so that they can be isolated from MAC address or IP address conflicts with other deployed VMs.

vCommander effortlessly enables fenced networking support for lab users, enabling them to deploy duplicate environments and copies of production applications without network address conflicts. Once an administrator defines a fenced VM (or series of VMs) in the service catalogue, vCommander goes to work to build and tear down the required network configurations automatically as the VM is provisioned and decommissioned. With support for static, pool based, or DHCP IP assignment, one-to-one and one-to-many Network Address Translation (NAT), vCommander simplifies how users can access VMs provisioned in this way, right from their usual workstation.

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Suite 200,4043 Carling AveOttawa, ONK2K 2A4

North America: +1 877 599 0494Phone: +1 613 599 0494Fax: +1 613 599 0953Email: info@embotics.com

vCommander5.1 System RequirementsHere are the requirements to get vCommander running in your environment.Getting started: To prepare for your vCommander installation you will need the following:

1. A VM with 2 x vCPU and 4GB vRAM2. Windows 2008R2 or 20123. An SQL database preferably running on SQL 2012 Standard

GuestOS Prerequisites: vCommander requires a user to be created on the GuestOS to run as a service. This is best accomplished by creating a local user that is not part of the local administrator group; password never expires; and user cannot change password options set. You will be prompted for the user credentials upon install.

vCommander Credentials: The following credentials are shipped with vCommander. We recommend you change them after you have installed vCommander.

• System Administrator - U: superuser P: secret• Portal Manager - U: manager P: secret• Portal User - U: user P: secret

Credentials: To take advantage of all vCommander’s features you will need the following credentials:

• vCenter, Amazon EC2, HP Cloud, and/or SCVMM passwords and API credentials as required

• SMTP user and password if required for sending emails• WMI domain credentials to support GuestOS scanning• LDAP/AD user and password to support directory services integration

(read-only access required)

Support: Should you experience any difficulty with your installation, you are entitled to support during your evaluation period. To open a case, please email support@embotics.com.

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