Virtual Lab Automation Blog

QUEST Dallas 2010

April 19-23, 2010 in Dallas, TX

Session title: Deploying Virtual Lab Automation in Cloud Environments

When: Friday, April 23, 2010 from 9:45-10:45 a.m. CT

Where: Dallas/Plano Marriott at Legacy Town Center in Dallas, TX

Presenter: Sameer Dholakia, CEO of VMLogix (www.vmlogix.com)

Session overview: Development and test labs in software engineering organizations continuously demand computing, storage, and networking infrastructure upgrades and support.  To address the challenges in providing these resources, IT administrators have moved toward lab server consolidation powered by virtualization from vendors like Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware. This lab consolidation is usually accompanied by a management layer called virtual lab automation (VLA).   Together, this enables the lab to operate as a private, on-premise cloud.  Many VLA technologies and products can now leverage public cloud infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services.  This session will review virtual labs enabled in private, public, and hybrid clouds as well as how these virtual labs help the software engineering process of development, build, and test. Sameer will also discuss key areas of consideration for organizations adopting or evaluating this approach including security, the business model benefits of the public cloud infrastructure, operational flexibility, user access models and compliance.

http://www.qaiquest.org/dallas/

Cloud Lab ‘10

April 19-23, 2010

Session title: Virtual Labs in the Cloud

When: Thursday, April 22 at 8 am PT/11 am ET

Where: online; to register, go here: http://www.cloudslamevent.com/cloudslam10/content/cloud-lab-10-admission-ticket

Presenter: Sameer Dholakia, CEO of VMLogix (www.vmlogix.com)

Session overview: Cloud computing is changing the fundamentals of today’s pre-dominantly on-premise hosted data centers. An increasing number of organizations are tapping into the public cloud when internal demand for resources becomes too high or when certain projects require resources beyond what an organization has available. This presentation will review virtual labs and how they can be used across private and public clouds for software development, testing, training and education, support desks, sales demos and IT operations. It will also discuss best practices and key areas for consideration including security, business model benefits, operational flexibility, user access models and organizational compliance.

http://www.cloudslamevent.com/virtual-labs-cloud

One of our customers, gDev FZ-LLC, an outsourcing services firm that leverages a global network of software providers to deliver the highest quality software development, recently did a joint webinar with Amazon and VMLogix to talk about their deployment of VMLogix LabManager – Cloud Edition (LabManagerCE) to manage the company’s virtual labs on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

LabManagerCE acts as the hub of gDev’s automated application lifecycle management (ALM) platform and has enabled gDev to improve development productivity and agility while accelerating software delivery times. To learn more about this deployment and how LabManagerCE works with the Amazon EC2, you can watch the recorded webinar  here.

Leading industry analyst, voke, just released an update to their 2007 Market Snapshot report covering the Virtual Lab Management market.  Theresa Lanowitz, lead analyst at voke, noted how far the market has come since 2007, and made some bold (and exciting!) predictions about its future, including the statement that it “will be the hub of the modern Application Lifecycle.”

And after their survey of 100 organizations using a Virtual Lab Management system, their quote of “Virtual Lab Management technology delivers immediate, measurable benefits and clear quick ROI” was particularly appealing to us.

For a copy of this report, please download a complimentary copy here:  http://www.vmlogix.com/Download-document/34-voke-Market-Snapshot-on-Virtual-Lab-Management/

We have been really excited to see dozens of Universities take advantage of our EDU program.  And we just recently announced that RIT is using our LabManager – Cloud Edition on top of the AWS Cloud.  RIT was thrilled to get out of the business of maintaining IT infrastructure, and was happy to move their labs to the Cloud.

If you missed the release, please find the details here:  http://www.vmlogix.com/index.php?option=com_events&task=view_detail&agid=44&year=2010&month=03&day=24&Itemid=194

We recently heard a great keynote by Steve Herrod of VMware. He was speaking at the 2010 VMware Partner Exchange on VMware’s technology roadmap. Here at VMLogix we completely agree with their vision of a hybrid cloud (also described at VMworld 2009), where the focus is on a user-centric IT model with the same user interface (their Project Redwood…stay tuned to hear about VMLogix’s forthcoming alternative) for both private cloud and public cloud environments so that there’s a frictionless transition between them.

Herrod also talked about VMware’s Lab Manager product as paving the way for VMware’s foray into delivering private clouds. Our VMLogix LabManager product is definitely a solution that transforms a virtualized data center into a private cloud – ours is just being delivered to pre-production users, like developers and testers. Which brings us to the question, what actually makes a private cloud and how is it different from just having virtualized servers? As Herrod discussed, a private cloud allows IT to establish policies on which users can access what resources. And once those policies have been established, a private cloud lets IT step out of the way and allows users to access these resources in a self-service, transactional fashion. The important distinction between a private cloud and a virtualized data center is that in a private cloud a) resources are abstracted from the user; b) users can access those resources in a self-service manner; and c) consumption of resources is metered.

For more information on what VMLogix believes cloud computing technology can enable for users, check out our “Introduction to Cloud Computing” white paper: http://www.vmlogix.com/Resources/.

We just publicly announced the great progress we made in 2009…the results speak for themselves: Doubled Revenue, Doubled Customer Count, Announced a Strategic OEM Relationship with Citrix, and Introduced our LabManager – Cloud Edition.

For more details, please see:  http://www.vmlogix.com/index.php?option=com_events&task=view_detail&agid=43&year=2010&month=02&day=01&Itemid=194

Campus Technology picked up the recent VMLogix offering of free LabManager licenses to Higher Education and Learning Institues. Read the full article at: http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/12/03/vmlogix-gives-free-licenses-to-higher-ed.aspx

You can get all of the details of the program and submit your request at the VMLogix Education Portal: http://www.vmlogix.com/VMLogix-Virtual-Lab-Automation-Solution-for-Education-Institutes-and-Universities/%20

David at VMblog has posted predicitons from VMLogix Founder and CTO Ravi Gururaj who thinks that 2010 will bring the growth and adoption of multiple hypervisors, and will see hybrid clouds adopted by the enterprise. Read the full article at http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/12/01/vmlogix-gazes-into-the-virtualization-and-cloud-crystal-ball-for-2010.aspx