Virtual Lab Automation Blog

There is a continuous drive against illegal/pirated software and this article presents recent developments.

Virtual lab automation solutions like VMLogix LabManager can help manage software license compliance requirements in the test lab. Since VLA solutions help centralize lab operations (from across many locations, business units, geographies, divisions, etc.) it is a natural choice to maintain a record of the licenses available in the lab. This is often half the battle — since a lot of organizations find it difficult to maintain a summary of the number of licenses owned. This is especially important in a virtual environment since VMs can be brought “up” and “down” very easily and sans a central VLA solution, a user can be hit with VM sprawl and license management problems very easily.

Like the article mentions, the upside to accurate license management is that organizations will not end up spending money on licenses when it is not really necessary (i.e., when there is a possibility of having too many licenses).

Here is a screenshot from VMLogix LabManager where users can specify licenses owned:

License managment screen in VMLogix LabManager

License management in LabManager can be configured to be ‘hard’ or ’soft’. With a hard license management setting, LabManager enforces the license use limit on machine templates and job configurations. This is useful in environments running under strict compliance requirements. The ’soft’ setting does not enforce the license limit but only tracks licenses used in the lab.

- Srihari Palangala