Scott Lowe’s blog carried a post on VMware Lab Manager Design Considerations written a couple of days back. As you read through the experiences and “gotchas” in that post, you probably want to bear the following in mind:
VMLogix offers a competing product (LabManager) in the virtual lab management area which users can use over private and public clouds. VMLogix is hypervisor agnostic in its virtual lab management and supports Citrix, Microsoft and VMware platforms (no vendor lock-in!). In the public clouds, you can use the VMLogix management capabilities on the Amazon public cloud. So, off the bat you have better platform support.
If you are interested in a product shoot-out, you can check our comparison of the VMLogix and VMware products here.
As you will see in the comparison table there are a few considerations listed in the VMware blog post that will no longer be “considerations” in a VMLogix deployment. For example, here are a couple (there are others like TCO etc. which I’ll not get in to here):
In VMware LM and quoting from the blog post — “Yes, you can set up user IDs in Lab Manager but you CAN NOT create groups. Groups must be imported into the LM Server from an LDAP server.” — VMLogix LabManager does not have a dependency external LDAP systems to create LabManager users/groups
In VMware LM and quoting from the blog post — “Lab Manager allows the user to take one (and only one!) snapshot of a configuration.” — VMLogix LabManager allows users to capture up to 10 snapshots for any VM. From a usability perspective this is useful when the VM snapshots are to be used in various test environments (vs. recreating the VMs from scratch).
LabManagerCE is a virtual lab management solution tailored for Amazon Web Services (AWS). LabManagerCE combines all of the benefits of our award winning on-premise solution with the flexibility of cloud computing resulting in a pay-as-you-go virtual lab solution. You can learn more about the solution here.
As part of the release, VMLogix is offering LabManager-Cloud Edition at no cost for a period of 90 days from the GA date. You can learn more and sign up for the free 90 day trial here.
VMLogix has announced the general availability of LabManager version 3.8. Read the full press release here.
The new features of VMLogix LabManager 3.8 include:
Support for VMware vCenter Server 4.0 and VMware vSphere: integrating with VMware vCenter Server 4.0, LabManager supports a lab with VMware vSphere or VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 hypervisors on the virtual hosts. The support for vCenter Server in LabManager allows administrators to benefit from platform management capabilities such as vMotion, DRS, HA and resource pools.
Updated support for Microsoft Hyper-V (Windows Server 2008 R2): extending platform support functionality, taking advantage of Hyper-V R2’s new shared cluster capability.
Network policies in configurations: allowing users to set custom firewall rules on the soft router in a configuration that allows virtual machines from within a LabManager configuration to connect to external IP addresses, outbound and inbound.
IP zones across multiple hosts: enabling IP-zoned LabManager configurations to be deployed across multiple virtual hosts.
VMLogix LabManager 3.8
Find out further details here and download the product brochure here.
Prof. Harry Bulbrook from Durham Technical Community College has written a paper titled “Using Virtual Machines to provide a secure Teaching Lab environment”. It is an interesting article and covers the challenges of teaching labs for a computer security class and how virtual machines help significantly.
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
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.
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
“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 ProspectCurrently 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
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