Lab Manager 3.0 Focuses on Resource Sharing

By Jeff Feinman

September 15, 2008 —  VMware has worked on simplifying the administration duties involved in corporate labs in the newest version of its lab automation product.

Lab Manager 3.0, released in early August, can help IT administrators work with multiple teams, projects and sites, from a central location, according to VMware executives. This can reduce overall resource requirements from sharing lab infrastructure.

“IT administrators can essentially carve out a portion of the shared lab infrastructure that is dedicated to a particular group of users or shared by multiple teams,” said Melinda Wilken, senior director of marketing for VMware. “Role-based access to virtual machine templates and library configurations ensure that teams can see only those systems that are relevant to their projects.”

The new version also allows administrators to map out any network topology and system configuration, Wilken said. This is beneficial in SOAs when there are connected multiple systems on multiple networks, because it allows administrators to do things like simulate in clustered applications, failover networks and other system configurations. VMware said that those things must be thoroughly tested in labs because business applications are getting increasingly complex.

There is tighter integration with VMware Infrastructure and VirtualCenter in Lab Manager 3.0. VMware said this makes lab infrastructure more resilient against system maintenance, hardware failures and other downtime. It also allows administrators to use VMware High Availability, which provides high availability for virtual machines; and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, which monitors utilization across resource pools and allocates available resources among virtual machines, based on a set of rules laid out by the administrator.

Lab Manager 3.0 can also integrate with Microsoft Active Directory so that user management and resource administration can be centralized to help simplify administration even more. Wilken explained that most organizations use Microsoft Active Directory to manage user access to corporate resources on the network. As employees move within the organization or new hires come on board, IT administrators want a single place to update user information or change access rights. This is done in Active Directory or any other LDAP compatible system.

“VMware Lab Manager can authenticate users against Active Directory and map user groups from Active Directory to specific user roles in Lab Manager,” Wilken said. “This capability really simplifies lab administration because IT administrators don't need to update user information in multiple systems since Lab Manager inherits the Active Directory settings and applies them across the entire lab infrastructure.”

Wilken added that the Active Directory integration goes hand in hand with the new feature that lets administrators work with multiple teams and sites from a central location.



Related Search Term(s): virtualization, Microsoft, VMware

Share this link: http://www.sysmannews.com/link/32848