Here's a radical thought. If a vendor really wants your business maybe they should provide you a free taste of what it is that they can actually do for you. After all, buying the product is the easy part. Living with it is what becomes expensive. So before you go through all the pain and agony of trying to make something work after you already paid for it, maybe vendors should provide something of value up front for free first. As the saying goes, nobody wants to spend good time after they already spent bad money.

A lot of the reasoning has gone into a new free virtualization management tool from Embotics called V-Scout. The basic idea is that because a lot of people are not sure they even have a virtual machine management problem, they might need some tangible proof. To that end, Embotics is offering a free version of V-Scout that will search your environment for virtual machine implementations and then automatically populate the information into a template that allows IT managers to ascribe costs to each virtual machine implementation. To find a review of V-Scout, click here.

The assumption that customers will find enough value in V-Scout to consider upgrading to the full version of V-Commander, which provides a more robust set of tools for dynamically managing virtual machines.

The simple fact is that a lot of people are keeping track of both physical and virtual servers using spreadsheets and sticky notes. Embotics is several steps up from that in terms of tracking and managing virtual machines in a way that can be easily shared with colleagues and managers. But people are creatures of habit, so they some times need an incentive to try something different because it takes time to master how to use any tool.

That human foible applies to just about any new product or technology, so maybe other vendors might want to consider taking a page out of the Embotics play book, especially if they really want busy IT people to invest not only their money but more importantly their time as well.