Computer Lab Management for Universities and Educational Institutes

If you would like to know more or request for a no-cost copy of the VMLogix virtual lab management solution for your University, please go to http://www.vmlogix.com/education

Virtual lab management at no cost to Universities worldwide

Army Research Lab – Using Amazon EC2 for Testing

This interesting write up that talks about the Army Research Lab using the Amazon cloud for scalability testing.

VMLogix recently announced virtual lab management capabilities over the Amazon cloud – so if you’re considering using the Amazon public cloud for your virtual lab (dev/test/demo/training/support) then you should check out the LabManager-Cloud Edition solution. You can also check out the YouTube movie of LabManager-Cloud Edition.

Here is what you get in terms of lab management capabilities over the Amazon cloud.

LabManager-Cloud Edition Management Capabilities

Learn about Citrix Lab Manager

Scott Hahn is evaluating Citrix Lab Manager for a prospect. He has put up a presentation that walks through Citrix Lab Manager for the uninitiated. Access the presentation here.

Like he mentions, Citrix Lab Manager has been OEMed from VMLogix earlier this year (VMLogix offers a hypervisor agnostic virtual lab solution and now has a virtual lab management solution for the Amazon public cloud as well – check the YouTube movie here).

He has some kind words about the solution, thank you Scott.

It [Citrix Lab Manager] is an awesome product with some great capabilities.  What surprised me was that this is a pretty mature product offering since they OEM it from vmlogix

Welcome Clustr Maps to the Blog

We’ve had 25K visitors to the blog over the past year and a half. Moving forward I figured it would be nice to track the visitor locations through Clustr Maps. I’ve seen this on other blogs every once in a while. It looks good and just another tidbit for you – the blog visitor.

Thanks for stopping by.

More Testimonials From Our Customers and Prospects

“VMLogix provided us the lowest TCO virtual lab solution with the best returns on our investment while providing advanced management capabilities around guest virtual machine automation. The multiple hypervisor support offered by VMLogix LabManager ensured that our organization was not trapped under any one particular hypervisor platform vendor. Being a specialist in the virtual lab automation space, we fully expect VMLogix to be a continued product leader with greater flexibility and faster product release cycles.” – Kalle Launiala, CEO, ProtonIT

“The advanced automation capabilities available in LabManager was a key decision criteria for us to choose VMLogix over competing products available in the market. VMLogix has delivered great value to us this far and we will be exploring the option of replicating the success with LabManager across multiple internal departments that need access to virtual labs. I’d also add that it has been a wonderful experience working with the VMLogix team – their individual attention and customer care shown has been immensely valuable to us.” – Tony Truong, Project Lead, Midmark Diagnostics Group

“This has been an outstanding first experience with VMLogix support. While a demo of the support experience is not the goal of any product evaluation the fact that we now have firsthand knowledge of the level of support we can expect as customers further adds to our confidence level as we proceed with our evaluation.” — A Prospect Currently Evaluating the VMLogix Solution

“We chose VMLogix over competing products because of the fine grained resource management flexibility and for the ease of product installation and ongoing maintenance all available at a very attractive total cost of ownership. VMLogix also provided us several nuance management capabilities (e.g., job timeout for lab management, role operations, persona controls for every lab resource etc.) – which clearly indicated to us that the lab management solution was well thought through and delivered as a product.” – Scott Hudson, Systems Administrator, Trimble

Managing Linux and Windows Instances on Amazon

VMLogix LabManager-Cloud Edition is a virtual lab management system (currently in beta) that works on public clouds (Amazon). See how easy it is for your users to access Linux and Windows instances in the Amazon cloud through the browser (no elaborate key exchanges etc.)!

LabManager-Cloud Edition provides several other capabilities like user management, multi-AMI management, user quotas, policies and leases, powerful automation, sharing and collaboration etc. You can unleash the Amazon cloud on your enterprise with this management capability.

• Enabling Self Service over the Public Cloud
• Unleash Amazon EC2 on Your Business Users through a Policy Governed Self Service Environment

The Cloud Makes Some Software Trials Easy!

I was reading this post by Ken Hess – My Midsummer Night’s Dream of A Virtual Lab. In the past, I’ve written about how virtual lab management software can help if you’re considering a virtual lab setup for your customer’s software trials and evaluations. If you’re considering a virtual lab for software trials, check out VMLogix LabManager or LabManager-Cloud Edition.

Here are some relevant points that the author makes:

To give fair assessments of vendor products, I need complete and fully functional copies of those products. Vendors who do supply me with their products never supply the required hardware to go along with them. Often the hardware requirements are very high thus making my use of the product almost impossible. A virtual lab is the only logical answer.

Instead of confusion and frustration, they’ll [customers, VARs, technical writers] experience your software the way you want them to: The correct hardware, the correct installation, the correct first impression.

Don’t assume success, guarantee it by providing those prospective customers with something that will surely close the deal for you: A virtual lab.

A virtual lab is my dream and my hope is that vendors will decide that it’s a good idea and implement it.

I completely agree – there is tremendous value in getting your customer/prospect up and running with your trial software with minimum obstacles and hoops to cross through. After all you want them to get to your product as quickly as possible and spend the time tinkering with the software (vs. spending cycles in waiting for required hardware etc.).

That’s where cloud computing makes a significant difference! Take our newly launched LabManager-Cloud Edition beta – you can get yourself setup with a trial version easily – no need of waiting/procuring hardware, installing software etc. etc. Just spend your time on — well, evaluating and trying out the trial software! (you’ll need an Amazon Web Services account, last I checked it did not take more than a couple of minutes to sign up for one!).

You could also use LabManager-Cloud Edition to power your virtual lab for software trials in the cloud!

Enabling Self Service Over the Public Cloud

Anyone looking at the public cloud as infrastructure for their virtual lab recognizes that policy governed self service is a critical requirement. Possibly the most important requirement. There are others too, a critical set of which our new LabManager-Cloud Edition handles. Check out the graphic below to get a birds eye view of the management capabilities.

LabManager-Cloud Edition (Early version) Management Capabilities

Since self service is critical, I figured I’d share a brief video of how the experience is for your end user while working with the LabManager-Cloud Edition to self serve their requirements on the public cloud (Amazon). If you’d like, you can request for a free trial on our website.