The startup Embotics, focus on the VM lifecycle management market, last week released a scaled down version of its upcoming V-Commander 2.0.
Called V-Scout, the product provides the inventory of online and offline virtual machines integrating with VMware Virtual Center, tracking how the size and the cost of the data center is changing over time.
The inventory can be searched looking for several attributes and several reports can be generated accordingly.
Customers can have the product for free but they must deal with a privacy issue: by default V-Scout sends back to Embotics a basic set of operational information.
The privacy statement published by the company describes what data is actually collected:
…the total number of successful logins, the number of user accounts, the number of custom attributes defined, the number of times a report is generated, uptime since last restart, and processing volume. Embotics V-Scout also collects information on the number of managed systems connected, various categories of the number of VMs being tracked, and the number of virtualization hosts under management. V-Scout does not collect information specific to individual users or details about specific VMs.
From time to time, V-Scout will log this information. Also, from time to time, V-Scout will send the information contained in the log, along with installation details, such as license key and registration email address, to Embotics over the internet.
Embotics allows customers to disable the feature anyway.
The product is available here.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.