Take a step back and think about how most administrators are “managing” their VMware virtual environments, and you will find that the word “management” does not really apply.

When it comes to virtual systems, most administrators are focused on the reactive and not the proactive form of management. What’s more, most of those same administrators spend hours every week updating spreadsheets manually with the specs of their virtual environments. There has to be a better way!

Embotics is hoping that better way comes in the form of its V-Commander VM management product and is now paving the path to V-Commander with V-Scout, a freeware utility that offers a subset of V-Commander’s capabilities. But V-Scout is more than just a tease for what V-Commander can do. V-Scout offers powerful capabilities from which any VMWare consumer can benefit.

V-Scout is billed as a free, agentless, centralized insight tool for VMware environments, which offers automated population reporting of VMware virtual centers. Users will find V-Scout offers population reports with historical trending, custom fields for information association and full inventory reporting.

Out of the box, the product comes with several report templates and allows users to perform ad-hoc reporting. The idea here is to replace manual methods of gathering and storing information about the various virtual machines in the environment and storing that information in a database. Users can then query the stored information to generate reports, track trends, understand environment changes and get pretty much anything else that they need to know from an informational point of view. Of course, V-Scout functions as a lead-in for V-Commander, a product that allows you to act on that information, but V-Commander will be the subject of another review.

Here at Channel Insider, we got a chance to kick the tires of V-Scout just prior to its Sept. 2 release date, and we found the product to be quite useful. We downloaded V-Scout from Embotics’ Web site and followed the installation wizard bundled with the downloaded executable. For the most part, installation is automatic, and most users can actually get started with V-Scout in a few minutes.

The real power of the product comes from its ability to seamlessly query VMware’s VirtualCenter to gather information about all of the VMs in the environment. Within minutes, users can use the product’s GUI to spit out reports on VMs, such as inventories, guest OSes, hosts and so on. Reports are output graphically to the screen and also available via a handy “print” button, making hard copies easy to create. The report engine allows users to filter reports by a number of elements or even create custom reports.

For solution providers, V-Scout can be a powerful services sales tool by demonstrating where VM environments are lacking (in management or otherwise), or V-Scout can actually be used to upsell to V-Commander.

For administrators, V-Scout is a valuable tool that allows harried administrators to finally get their arms around their VM environments and give insight into what is actually happening with their virtual systems. The product is both a timesaver and management tool, and comes at an unbeatable price–free! To download V-Scout, visit Embotics and follow the links.