VMLogix LabManager version 3.7

VMLogix will be releasing LabManager version 3.7 shortly.

The focus for new features in this release has been on:

• Adding virtual lab management functionality for the administrators – specifically around email notifications and leases (job deployment and storage).
• Adding specific functionality in the product to address the use of LabManager in a training lab scenario.

If you are looking to build a virtual lab for your organization’s training department, you will really want to check out this release from VMLogix. You can go to our website to request for a demo and webinar. If you’re curious to learn more about use of LabManager in a virtual training lab, check out the case study on our website.

More Customer Kudos for VMLogix LabManager

“With just the one training session, most people were off and running. I have only had to do addition training to people who were not in my original session. This speaks to how easy LabManager is to use and was one of the major deciding factors in our decision to purchase VMLogix LabManager over the competitors’ products.” – Senior Software Engineer, Pitney Bowes

“I think the best judge of success is if people are using LabManager. During the week of Mar 30 to April 6 I have had as many as 45 jobs running (our average is about 40 jobs). During that same week there were 207 VMs deployed and approximately the same number undeployed.” – Senior Software Engineer, Pitney Bowes

“LabManager is giving us better resource utilization by removing machine when they are not in use.” – Senior Software Engineer, Pitney Bowes

There is a free evaluation version of the VMLogix LabManager product available for download here.

Scalability in VMLogix LabManager

If you’re trying to run large multi-machine configurations in a virtual lab, here is something that might interest you. I’ve put down two figures below. The first shows a 125 role (a “role” is a virtual machine) configuration running in VMLogix LabManager. The second figure shows the virtual host view on which these VMs have been deployed.

This type of scalability across many managed virtual lab hosts (and size of configuration) is important as you consider using your virtual lab for training and demos (where many students are likely to load their labs or pre-sales engineers are likely to load the virtual hosts). It is also important in the case of software development/test and software support, but probably more important in a training/demo virtual lab environment.

A configuration with 125 virtual machines deployed in VMLogix LabManager

The 125 role configuration is deployed on a farm of virtual hosts

Resource Reservations in a Virtual Lab

A virtual lab management solution allows end users to access centralized lab infrastructure to create and deploy multi-virtual machine configurations in an on-demand and self service manner. In this context, do resource reservations in virtual labs help?

Resource Reservations Hinder the On-Demand and Self-Service Model of Virtual Labs

Here are some considerations as you think about resource reservations and their relevance in your virtual lab:

• Reservations encumber the end users – Virtual lab management solutions are geared towards solving volatile and on-demand lab infrastructure needs of end users. For example, a QA engineer discovers a bug and needs to pass to the developer – who can then run the configuration to evaluate and fix the bug. Or, a technical support engineer who needs to spin up a configuration as they are speaking to the customer on the phone.  Imagine if the developer or the technical support engineer had to reserve resources prior to running the configurations! How troublesome would that be?
• Reservations can be easily misused – Users in your virtual lab can easily reserve resources “just in case” it is required. Are resources freed up/delegated to others at the right time to avoid a skewed view of the lab capacity due to over-reservations?
• Reservations are typically useful for a hosted virtual lab service provider – Reservations of a resource imply scarcity of the resource. So, if you are with a hosted virtual lab provider, it is likely they are going to ask you to reserve resources – because as a provider they have SLAs to meet and don’t want to end up in situations where a sales engineer walked into a client to find that s/he is second in line to deploy a configuration. Or an instructor ready to start a training class with paying students is made to wait by a hosted virtual lab provider. Net-net, it is a feature that the hosting provider primarily benefits from and asks its users/subscribers to live with it.
• Thoughts about Resource Reservations from Andrew Binstock – Andrew Binstock some time ago (around 2.5+ years ago) wrote about the downsides of resource reservations in virtual labs in this article. He writes:

…And because the reservation system is unforgiving, it is more of a pain in lab contexts than a benefit. Moreover, given the low price of hardware these days, most sites will choose to add a few boxes to their virtualization platforms if they don’t have enough capacity, rather than impose a reservation system.

• Thoughts about Resource Reservations from VMware – This post references VMware’s thoughts on resource reservations in virtual lab systems and refers to it as a bug being made to look like a feature.

James Phillips, VMware’s senior director of lifecycle solutions, responded to this criticism by saying that Surgient’s scheduling requirement is “a classic case of a vendor trying to make a bug look like a feature. … Surgient requires scheduling lab time because it takes forever to deploy a Surgient configuration to the server pool.”

“Instead of having users wait around for up to an hour for a Surgient configuration to be ready to use, Surgient requires that they schedule a time for the configuration to be deployed. This way, the configuration is ready when the user’s time comes,” Phillips said. “This is great if you are running a training class tomorrow, not great at all if you just built a software system and need to run a quick test on it.”

At VMLogix we have chosen consciously not to build lab reservations as a feature into our LabManager product – simply because we did not believe that it was the right design decision. I suspect the same thought process was held at VMware as well – since their competing product kept away from burdening users with this capability. Instead, we have chosen to spend our time and energies on building tremendous flexibility into the deployment and scheduling of jobs.

As a Virtual Lab User, You’re Not Looking for Reservations – You need Flexibility in Job Deployment and Scheduling

With VMLogix LabManager, we have built the following capabilities and flexibility for end users to schedule and deploy their jobs:

• Job deployment with priority: A deployment job with high priority will be given preference over one of lower priority at deployment time if both are queued
• Easily launch multiple deployments: With a simple slider movement, a user can deploy a job configuration multiple times (e.g., if multiple testers need to run their test cases on the same environment, the admin can give all testers access to their own environments easily)
• Job deployment at a specific date and time: Users can specify a date and time when the job deployment is to occur (by default they can deploy it immediately for on-demand, self serve provisioning)
• Job deployment lease time: Users can specify the job deployment lease time (i.e., a deployment job cannot continue to run longer than a certain period of time) and this can be configured for every job deployed. Users can also specify the action to be taken upon job lease expiry
• Job queuing: Users can queue a job in LabManager so that the job runs as soon as the resources it needs become free/available
• Job Auto Completion and Action on Error: User can specify that LabManager release the guest VM roles once all the job operations are completed. Also, users can specify the action to be taken in case there is an error in the job
• Job deployment on specific hosts: Administrators can reserve hosts exclusively for certain users/teams

Several customers have found the job deployment and scheduling flexibility in VMLogix LabManager as a powerful and valuable differentiator.

Job deployment leases in VMLogix LabManager

Job scheduling in VMLogix LabManager

Reservations and The Trend Towards Adoption of the Cloud: Cloud computing is the emerging trend of the future. The premise of public cloud computing is to provide users with dynamic, scalable, elastic and graded access to IT resources (compute, storage and networking). The concept of reservations are fundamentally negated in this cloud scenario — e.g., it is not hard to imagine a customer tapping the cloud for overflow/burst capacity. If one doesn’t believe this reservation feature to be constraining now (as VMware and VMLogix do), it’s hard to argue that it won’t be obsolete as the Public Clouds get adopted for overflow demand in the future.

Guest Post on VMblog.com

Yesterday David Marshall was kind enough to post a guest article from VMLogix on VMblog.com. The article talks about the “second order of automation” in virtual labs and the ability to automate operations within guest virtual machines in a multi-machine configuration. This is a powerful differentiator separating the VMLogix virtual lab solution from the competing VMware solution.

Read the full guest post here: Guest Virtual Machine Automation in Virtual Labs.

VMLogix LabManager Customer Case Studies

We’ve talked about VMLogix LabManager being well suited for many virtual lab scenarios – including software engineering (dev/test), training, support and demo virtual lab environments.

We recently uploaded three chapters in our use case series on the VMLogix website.

You can access these here.

• VMLogix use case: Software support and help desk services
• VMLogix use case: Accelerating product demo setup and delivery
• VMLogix use case: Delivering software product training

Virtualize your Test Lab (A Customer’s Perspective)

There is an interesting discussion going on at the Agile Software Testing Yahoo group around the benefits of virtualizing your test lab.

One of our customers who loves our guest automation capabilities (see a demo of this capability) has responded and added his thoughts to the thread. Here is what our customer had to say (bold mine):

> For test labs, if you have some technical people, you can actually put
> together automated lab solutions where, with the ‘press of a button’ you can
> deploy mutli-box topologies with automated configuration behind it.
> Depending on the time to deploy (mostly the complexity of the environment
> and the post-deploy configuration, including data population) you could tie
> this into your CI solution and run unit tests/bvts on a clean environment
> (which may–or may NOT–be useful to you).

We’ve implemented this at Atlassian by integrating VMLogix’s LabManager
(http://www.vmlogix.com/Products/VMLogix-LabManager/) with our own Bamboo CI
server.
One of the great features of VMLogix’s product (and I say this as a paying
customer) is it’s ability to automate the installation and configuration of
software on virtual machines. This means we don’t have to manually configure
VMs. If a CI build needs to run on a certain platform (o/s, jdk, app server,
database, browser, etc.) and no VM image already exists that matches these
requirements, Lab Manager will create one as part of the build (and save it for
later use if desired).
We use this feature to also install a remote agent for our CI server on the
VM(s) once they’re deployed. This remote agent is what triggers and monitors the
build and passes artifacts like test results back to the CI server. When the
build finishes, Bamboo instructs LabManager to undeploy the VM(s), freeing up
resources for other builds.
This infrastructure benefits manual testing as well, because testers can not
only deploy, but also design custom VM environments in minutes via LabManager’s
web interface.

If you’d like to try out VMLogix LabManager yourself, download the free trial version from here.

Demo: Software License Management in Virtual Labs

Managing (i.e., monitoring, tracking, compliance) software licenses in a virtual lab is a challenge. With virtual machines (VMs) being spawned and torn down continuously in the transient non-production environment, it is hard for an IT administrator to track and stay in license compliance.

VMLogix LabManager provides powerful license management capabilities that allow you to:

• Enforce license limits
• Set appropriate environment variables when a license is instantiated
• Instantiate and count against the use of a license when a software package is installed in a VM
• Instantiate and count against the use of a license when a virtual machine is deployed

This demo walks you through these capabilities.