Overall, the vCloud Connector is seductively convenient. The limitations are: vSphere requires IE7+ only (other browser users: go fish as vSphere is oddly captive to Windows), it currently doesn't refresh object states easily — relegating it to quick-and-dirty movements, and finally, it doesn't work with other VMware VM movement tools, like High Availability clustering or vMotion.

But it's free. And it's got the very seductive quality of doing tricks that only command-line lovers can do.

Henderson is principal researcher and Allen is a researcher for ExtremeLabs in Indianapolis. They can be reached at thenderson@extremelabs.com.

in Network World's Data Center section.