Virtual Lab Automation Blog

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).
    

So, if you’re involved in a virtual lab managment deployment – consider evaluating the VMLogix products. If you’re a University, the product is offered at no cost.