Embotics Management Tool Tots Up The Cost Of Virtualisation

Embotics’ latest release of its V-Commander cloud  management platformincludes the ability to compare the costs of installing and using different virtualisation platforms within the data centre.

Although the product is called V-Commander for Microsoft Hyper-V, it offers a cost breakdown of which virtualisation engine suits the hardware and proposed service provision in a multi-hypervisor environment.

Hidden costs

The problem facing a lot of companies is that they may have focused on a specific platform without considering what they have actually paid for within a Microsoft licence. Embotics claims that it is not trying to push any particular platform but to use costing data fed back by its customers to uncover the truth of the return on investment claims and counterclaims made by the competing vendors.

Colin Wright, Embotics VP for EMEA, explained, “When everybody started to virtualise, they all knew the cost saving from day one. Now neither the channel partner nor the customer knows how cheap the platform is to run.”

He claimed that V-Commander can tot up the costs of running different hypervisor implementations, using real-world figures, within 24 hours. Costing can be difficult because of the licensing models involved. Although, for example, VMware licensing can be directly compared with a Microsoft Hyper-V licence, site licences and other group licensing schemes may contain a “free” licence for virtualisation that complicates the calculation.

“The majority of customers we see have Microsoft licences,” Wright said. “We are the independent broker that sits in the middle but we are only going by the customer costs that they put into the system. It’s not what Microsoft is saying, not what VMware tells them, not even what we are saying, but their real tangible costs. It’s a services opportunity to migrate unused or less mission-critical workloads from VMware across to Hyper-V.”

Multiple hypervisors

Jay Litkey, CEO of Embotics, added, “Increasingly, data centres are managing multiple hypervisors. In order to harmonise cloud automation across these elements, organisations need to know where to place workloads for greatest economic advantage, regardless of their understanding of the underlying hypervisor technology.”

V-Commander takes into account features such as self-service, service catalogues, IT costing and chargeback, workflow automation, resource optimisation and lifecycle management when assessing the deployments. The move to incorporate public and private clouds within a data centre often forces managers to consider the costs of mixing VMware and Hyper-V, for example.

Decisions are often based on the platform of choice rather than considering the cost implications. Another driver for mixed environments is that the services required may demand a particular hypervisor. Calculating the effect of this should be a vital part of the planning stage.

Bernd Harzog, an analyst at the Virtualization Practice, observed, “Multi-hypervisor environments are proliferating because they promise cost advantages without degrading performance, but accomplishing that goal requires a management and automation platform that reveals cost breakdowns to inform decision-making. The multi-tenant cost model lets enterprises take economic control of their data centres.”

As the environment evolves, the cost/functionality ratio can change, during its normal task of managing the environment V-Commander can be used to retrofit the environment to achieve the best return on investment and identify waste that can be reclaimed in Hyper-V systems.

In the next few months, Embotics will be making announcements to expand V-Commander to fulfil the company’s aim to support “any hypervisor, any cloud”.