V-Commander now supports Amazon AWS EC2


Embotics V-Commander is marketed as cloud management software but until version 5.0.x it’s only supported VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. With the release of 5.x, Embotics V-Commander is truly entering the realm of Cloud Management starting with Amazon EC2. V-Commander is clearly the easiest virtualization or cloud management software I have ever installed but its strengths do not end there. V-Commander is basically and overlay for multiple virtualization platforms that provides further value in it’s ability to offer self-service provisioning, resource monitoring, policy management and more. It’s a complete solution for VM life-cycle management.

Its decision to support Amazon AWS EC2 instances is a smart. I would assume Embotics would add support for other cloud providers moving forward to V-Commander but that’s to be seen. Keeping in line with its simplicity of setup mentality, connecting to your AWS EC2 environment is a piece of cake. Only three things are required:

  • Name:
  • Access Key ID:
  • Secret Access Key:

Once you’ve connected to your EC2 environment and its inventory has synchronized you’ll see each region and all it’s instances.

The hierarchy starts with your account at the top-level then separates by each region then further by EC2-Classic and VPC’s. You can right-click an instance for more functionality. The basic functions of stop, start and terminate are available with more V-Commander capabilities. Once your connected to your AWS EC2 environment you’ll most likely want to configure provisioning capabilities.

In order to leverage provisioning you’ll have to create private templates in EC2 then refresh the inventory in V-Commander. Setting up the service in the “Service Catalog” is just like any other service you’d configure for VMware vSphere or MS Hyper-V. It takes a few steps to complete the process but once it’s done you can present an EC2 instance template as a service in V-Commander that can be requested by anyone with access to do so.

Embotics V-Commander has great capabilities and with the addition of AWS EC2 support the enterprise can move into leveraging cloud infrastructure with ease. And for current customers, the move would allow for the seamless integration of policy enforcement, self-service provisioning, access control and so on.