Article New Lab Manager by VMware Accelerates the Software Development Process New Lab Manager by VMware Accelerates the Software Development Process Author: Alexey Vasilyev Applies to: VMware Lab Manager Date: December 25, 2006
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At the end of December, 2006, VMware finally released its new product Lab Manager. Earlier the product was already known as Akimbi Slingshot. But now that EMC Corp. has acquired Akimbi Systems, VMware has also obtained Akimbi Slingshot which has been developed and named VMware Lab Manager.

So what’s new about VMware Lab Manager?

Based on VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3, Lab Manager enables developers and software quality assurance engineers to collect and distribute the full set of system configurations on the basis of virtual machines.

Software development companies can now create a special virtual machine library that contains test cases, real client/server interaction schemes, user environments and various OS configurations.

While testing or developing new software, e.g. when you test a new iteration in the user environment context, VMware Lab Manager can immediately distribute and prepare to use all necessary configurations in the most convenient server resource pool.

By the way, the special network deployment technology in VMware Lab Manager allows users to deploy the same VM configurations without the need to change IP and MAC addresses and Security IDs, which ensures conflict-free network environment.

With the new tool there is no need to waste time setting up operation systems, configuring applications and adjusting network connections. A single click on the Deploy item of the VMware Lab Manager menu will be enough. Now QA-engineers and developers can fulfill their tasks in the framework of VMware infrastructure policies like storages’ quotas and the server deployment policy.

The order of VM configuration deployment looks as follows:

1. The user selects a “multi-machine” configuration out of the library and clicks “Deploy”.
2. VMware Lab Manager selects the most convenient host to distribute virtual machines with the configuration selected by the user.
3. After that the user gets access to consoles of these machines and can control them as well as clone them, add changed configurations to the library and make them publicly available.

VMware Lab Manager offers great opportunities to the software development world. The product is easy to use and time-saving, which will suit both parties of the technological process; developers and testers.

VMware Lab Manager opens new ways of virtual machines’ usage in the software development sphere and allows QA engineers and developers to solve serious problems:

• in case an error appears only at the QA engineer’s machine, VMware Lab Manager allows you to share the saved VM configuration and show it to the developer;
• with VMware Lab Manager you can not only build a multi-machine virtual structure in the virtual network segment (e.g. SQL Server + Client), as it can be done in VMware Workstation through Virtual Machine Teaming, but also perform remote operation of this structure;
• VMware Lab Manager provides consolidated work of QA engineers and developers due to more close interaction and immediate reaction to any environment changes in the development process.

QA engineers will be particularly pleased at the ability to integrate the product with such well-known systems as:

However, note that this way to organize the software development process is rather costly. Besides VMware Lab Manager, you will need a virtual infrastructure including at least one ESX Server.

The start price of VMware Lab Manager will be $15000. Taking into account the price of VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3, the solution will cost at least $35000.