Self-Service IT Managed Service Provider Lab Management

Product brochure

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Mature Self-Service ITAre you looking for a solution that makes self-service IT simple? Are you finding VMware vCAC too complex and costly?Organizational adoption and internal process changes can be challenging enough when enabling self-service, automating provisioning, and delivering IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS)—why add unnecessary technical complexity to the mix?

With Embotics® vCommander™ you won’t add any unnecessary complexity:

• We can get you up and running quickly without professional services.

• There’s no learning curve for your administrators—they’ll get an intuitive, well-designed, out-of-the-box interface.

• Effective business reporting on your virtual estate is part of vCommander’s DNA—you don’t have to connect three or four different products to get the information you need to run your business.

• Configurationisstraightforwardwitheasy-to-usewizardstohelpyou set it up right out of the box.

• We support multiple hypervisors and cloud platforms without vendor and platform lock-in.

WithvCommander,there’snointegrating,noextendedconfigurationeffort, and no headaches. We’ve developed vCommander from the ground up on a common architecture to deliver an all-in-one solution that supports multiple hypervisors and multiple clouds.

It’s a mature solution developed over many years with input from our customers on what’s important to them.

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Cost VisibilityEasily provide IT chargeback or showback to your users with vCommander’s built-in cost calculation and simple-to-use wizard-based cost models that you can customize for both private and public infrastructure.

Many IT organizations are discovering that the firststep to self-service IT is cost visibility. Even if your organization is not ready for full-on chargeback—and many aren't—providing cost visibility to the consumers ofITservicesisoftenagoodfirststep. vCommander has a solution for cost visibility at every level of your organization’s maturity. Get visibility into VM costs, run what-if scenarios that compare workload costs on different infrastructures, and enable IT cost and billing reporting.

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Complexity-free AlternativeAre you tired of the complexity and repetitive configuration of IT self-service solutions such as VMware vCAC, OpenStack, and Microsoft SCCM / SCSM / SharePoint? IT self-service can be easy.

vCommander provides a powerful and easy-to-use platform without the repetitiveconfiguration,laborintensiveoperation,andoverallcostofotherIT self-service solutions. See why so many companies have switched to vCommander.

Multi-hypervisor & Multi-cloud ManagementDo you want to provide service utilizing multiple vendors’ hypervisors and clouds without being locked into a particular solution or platform? vCommander allows you to escape vendor lock-in.

vCommander supports many popular hypervisors and public cloud providers, and we add support for new platforms in each major release. vCommander is focused on providing business value on any hypervisor and any cloud, without locking you into a particular vendor’s technology.

Benefits End User Self-Service & Distributed AdministrationAre your users demanding that virtual machines (VMs) be provisioned in minutes and hours instead of days or weeks? Do you want to allow your users to perform simple administration without compromising access to your data center? Give your users what they want.

Today’s connected marketplace offers users a variety of self-service options to get what they need to be competitive. As a world-class IT organization, your business units and users are no different. vCommander enables personalized self-service for IT and business users through easily customizable service catalogs and an on-demand user portal. vCommander self-service empowers business and DevOps teams to quickly get the most out of your private and public infrastructure.

By offering a better user experience than any other commercial IT self-service product, vCommander helps IT deliver value. vCommander features such as dynamic calculation of resource cost at the moment that users request them, and resource and cost saving suggestions for overprovisionedVMs,helpinfluenceuserbehavior.

Got a shadow IT problem with Amazon Web Services (AWS)? vCommander allows you to provide 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 yourusersthepowertomanagetheirVMswithprivilegesthatyoudefineas an administrator, allowing them to complete simple tasks themselves while you focus on more important things.

Whatever your challenge, vCommander’s flexibility lets you configurecustom 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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Economic Comparisons & RationalizationDemonstrate the value of internal IT by providing economic comparisons of your private infrastructure to other managed infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), HP Cloud, Rackspace, and others with vCommander’s built-in cost reporting.

Are your IT consumers telling you that Amazon costs less than their own internal IT? Why not give them cost reporting for their IT consumption and prove them wrong?

vCommander can compare workload costs (including ancillary support costs) to determine whether moving to another hypervisor or cloud would make sense for you. It rationalizes multi-hypervisor, private cloud and Hybrid-IT adoption through reclamation, optimization and workload migration, and compares the costs of deployment between different private and public clouds. These include clouds fully managed by vCommander, such as Amazon or HP, and other public clouds such as IBM SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and Google Cloud Platform.

Features

Flexible 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 itsbuilt-inorchestrationengineand libraryof commonworkflowsteps, vCommander automates 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.

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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.

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Leading Practice Reports & AnalyticsCreate a more efficient environment on day one with vCommander’sleading practice reports to identify waste, optimize resources, and pinpoint underperforming infrastructure right out of the box.

IT organizations are under pressure to demonstrate value. Show your IT consumers the value that IT is delivering with vCommander leading practice reports and analytics.

With vCommander, you can easily export data and automate report generation and searches through scheduling, giving you critical insight into thevalueandefficiencyofyourvirtualassets.Youcanalsodelivervalue to the business from day one with configuration-free searchesand dashboards.

Capacity Planning & ManagementQuickly compile capacity and trending reports for management and business stakeholders, allowing VM resource usage predictions and planning.

vCommander provides out-of-the-box reports and a dashboard that help you to visualize infrastructure capacity and enable you to project future use based on identified trends. Scheduled reports keep managementinformed of the current state of your infrastructure.

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Managed Service ProvidersAre you competing with VMware for business?With the uncertain future of vCloud® Director (vCD) and the launch of vCloud Hybrid Service, the writing is on the wall: VMware wants to eat your lunch.

Embotics® vCommander™ gets you to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and customer self-service without vendor bias and lock-in.

Embotics will never compete with you at what you do best. With our vCommander Cloud Management Platform (CMP) software, you’ll get fast time-to-value and an easy-to-use solution that enables self-service and provisioning automation. You can quickly tailor vCommander’sextensive feature set to the unique needs of your business.

vCommander is a cost-effective cloud management solution that delivers customer self-service, distributed administration and lifecycle automation capabilities in a single, integrated software package.

Unlike VMware vCD or vCloud® Automation Center™ (vCAC) and other complex management and provisioning solutions that require extensive customization, implementation and training, you’ll reap immediatebenefitswithvCommander.

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BenefitsComplexity-free Customer Self-Service SolutionAreyoutiredofthecomplexityandrepetitiveconfigurationofcustomerself-service solutions such as VMware vCD / vCAC, OpenStack, and Microsoft SCCM / SCSM / SharePoint? Customer self-service can be easy.

vCommander provides a powerful and easy-to-use platform without therepetitiveconfiguration,labor-intensiveoperation,andoverallcostof other customer self-service solutions. See why so many people have switched to vCommander.

Customer Self-Service & Distributed AdministrationLooking for a way for your customers to easily provision, initiate change requests and administrate their virtual assets? Let vCommander solve the problem for you.

Youprovideworld-classservices,sodon’t letyourcustomerssettlefor anything less than a world-class portal. Today’s managed service provider landscape offers a lot of choice— everything from public cloud to large national competitors. Show your customers that you’re a world-class competitor by giving them an intuitive interface to manage their virtual assets.

With vCommander, your customers have access to a service portal that provides an experience that competes with public cloud providers on delivery times and service.

In addition, vCommander offers easy integration with backup solutions andconfigurationautomationplatformssuchasOpscodeChef andPuppet Labs Puppet. Differentiating your service from the big guys is getting interesting.

Complexity-free IntegrationAre you looking for a solution that’s a cinch to integrate with your existing service offering? vCommander makes integration effortless.

As a service provider, you already integrate multiple products to support your customer. vCommander makes working with your existing infrastructure a breeze. Its extensive REST API and integration points make automating processes such as customer on-boarding, billing, asset management and custom automations simpler and more straightforward.

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Multi-TenantvCommander can seamlessly support multiple customers or organizations through approvals and automation, policies, and even service offerings customized for each customer.

With vCommander’s per-organization approvals, quotas, and completion actions, you can tailor your service offerings to each customer, just as you do today.

Features

Private Label BrandingEmbotics allows you to white-label the service portal with your logo, colors and brand look-and-feel, making it easy for you to introduce vCommander as an integral part of your overall services.

With the use of a simple style guide, Embotics allows our service provider customers to remove vCommander branding, allowing you to deliver a seamless experience to your customers.

Chargeback & BillingvCommander interfaces with third-party platforms for billing, service management, and asset management.

vCommander’s REST API makes it easy to access VM billing records, working with your existing billing system to invoice customers. Furthermore, vCommander provides billing reports right out of the box should you need a more direct billing experience for your customers.

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Flexible Workflows & Lifecycle ManagementAutomate customer provisioning and decommissioning using policy-based rules and automation.

With its built-in orchestration engine and library of common workflowsteps, vCommander automates 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.

As well, vCommander’s multi-tenant capability allows you to provide a unique experience for each customer, from approvals to provisioning automation and virtual data center quotas.

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—differentiating your service has never been easier.

Console RDP Proxy AppliancevCommander provides console and RDP access to your customers securely and over public networks such as the Internet.

vCommander provides an optional proxy appliance that allows users secure console access to their VMware and HyperV VMs. Customers can open multiple console and RDP sessions simultaneously through their browser, while generating access records for audit purposes.

Customer Facing RightsizingProvide additional value to your customers with vCommander’s VM performance and cost rightsizing recommendations.

vCommander can provide rightsizing recommendations on virtual resources (CPU, memory, and storage) to both your administrators and your customers in the service portal, enabling them to decide when a VM is overprovisioned and assisting you to get the most from your infrastructure investment. vCommander allows you to tailor the rightsizing synopsis that is presented to your customers—for example, permit only upsizing recommendations and not downsizing.

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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,youwon’tbespendingdaysconfiguringsoftware—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 yourinfrastructure? 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 configureanapprovalprocesstokeepsprawlatbay.

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 usevCommandergivesyouthefeaturesandflexibilityavailablein 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 ManagementProvidingasoftware-defineddatacenterforyourusersshouldbeuncomplicated.vCommanderprovidesaflexiblemodelthat’seasilytailored to your organization’s needs.

vCommander allows IT to create virtual data centers, empowering enduserstomanagetheirownVMsandserviceswithinpredefinedquotas for CPU, memory and disk. Administrators can assign quotas to IT-defined organizations, individuals, or a combinationofboth formaximumcontrol.Approvalworkflowsallow formulti-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 workflowsteps, 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 themto complete simple tasks themselves while you focus on more important things.

Whateveryourchallenge,vCommander’sflexibilityletsyouconfigurecustom 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 savemoney, vCommander allows you to define powerschedules 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 fromMACaddressor IPaddressconflictswithotherdeployedVMs.

vCommander effortlessly enables fenced networking support for lab users, enabling them to deploy duplicate environments and copies of production applications without network address conflicts. Oncean administrator defines a fencedVM (or series of VMs) in the servicecatalogue, vCommander goes to work to build and tear down the required network configurations automatically as the VM is provisioned anddecommissioned. With support for static, pool based, or DHCP IP assignment, one-to-one and one-to-many Network Address Translation (NAT), vCommander simplifieshowuserscanaccessVMsprovisionedinthisway,rightfromtheir 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 neverexpires;andusercannotchangepasswordoptionsset.Youwillbeprompted 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: Shouldyouexperienceanydifficultywithyourinstallation,youare entitled to support during your evaluation period. To open a case, please email support@embotics.com.

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