Virtual Lab Automation Blog

I came across Eric Siebert’s write up on “When not to treat VMs like physical servers“. It is an informative post and he does make valid points — especially if you are in a situation where you are only running VMs independently on hypervisors.

In a test/dev/support/training or pre-production lab environment where you can have many VMs under the purview of a central lab management system (like VMLogix LabManager), then you do have some additional management functionality to help address some of the points he raises.

• One of the concerns raised is running operations on VMs concurrently (with VMs that are hosted on the same server). With a virtual lab automation solution like VMLogix LabManager, users can leverage automation capabilities to execute scripts/demand scans/commands/re-booting of machines, installing of software etc. in an automated manner. Here is a screenshot of all the automation operations available in VMLogix LabManager. With the automation capability and the ability to schedule jobs on hosts, users can cascade/stagger operations with VMs. This helps control the load on physical hosts.
  
• With a centralized VM management system user and team management is simplified — the lab administrator can control user/team access to lab resources (such as machine templates, configurations etc.). Users/teams can also share lab resources with appropriate permissions (view/edit/delete). This functionality helps in driving security and access control to lab resources. Here is a screenshot:

User and Team Management in LabManager

• Performance monitoring – Again a centralized virtual lab management system helps track VM use of host resources (in addition to other performance monitoring capabilities). Here is a screenshot of VMLogix LabManager monitoring the hosts’ RAM utilization.

Reports in VMLogix LabManager

What do you think? Do these functions help you work with VMs providing a layer of management control as you transition from working with physical to virtual machines?

If you would like to learn more, register for a free evaluation of VMLogix LabManager.

- Srihari Palangala (srihari@vmlogix.com)