VMware vCenter Lab Manager

Overview:

VMware vCenter Lab Manager, part of the VMware vCenter family of management products, provides on-demand access and automated management of the internal cloud for dev and test, enabling higher service levels for end users and eliminating repetitive provisioning tasks for IT.

Benefits

• Provide on-demand access to internal cloud resources for end users, while ensuring IT control.
• Instantly repurpose hardware in support of various teams and project needs.
• Eliminate time-consuming provisioning tasks for IT staff.
• Reduce storage footprints and contain storage growth.
• Optimize resource utilization of shared infrastructure.
• Improve processes, communication and team collaboration.

Experience the Benefits of the Internal Cloud for Dev/Test

VMware vCenter Lab Manager is the ideal solution for IT organizations who want to provide self-service provisioning and management capabilities to internal teams. Policy-based access control reduces administrative burden for IT, lowers infrastructure management costs and empowers project teams to deliver applications more quickly and with greater agility.

Deliver Higher Service Levels and Lower Infrastructure Costs

Lab Manager offers unique capabilities to simplify management of the internal cloud for dev/test:

• Self Service Portal - Provides on-demand access to a library of virtual machine configurations for end users while eliminating time-consuming provisioning tasks for IT by 95%.
• Automated Resource Management - Allows dynamic allocation of resources in a multi-team environment, enforces quotas and access rights, and reclaims unused infrastructure services.
• Enterprise Scalability – Provides long-term return on investment with a scalable architecture for worldwide deployment, best in class performance and seamless integrations with in-house and 3rd party solutions.

Accelerate Application Development and Testing

Give every engineer the equivalent of their own personal datacenter. In seconds, Lab Manager deploys, captures and shares any system configuration, enabling teams to rapidly prototype new applications, test software releases on a broader range of system configurations and capture, reproduce and resolve defects more easily. The Lab Manager API, as well as integrations with leading test and build management tools, provides additional automation benefits to allow for continuous testing and integration of software applications. This capability shortens delivery schedules and increases software quality.

Automate Release Management

Eliminate the risk of failed production system updates. Application owners can create faithful replicas of production systems for patch testing and seamlessly transition updated system configurations across testing, staging and production environments connected to different networks, server and storage systems. Lab Manager allows release teams to update production systems more quickly, shorten maintenance windows and avoid downtime. Collaboration and Get to Market Faster

Lab Manager is ideally suited to support a broad range of use cases including:

• Support and Helpdesk Operations – Troubleshoot customer problems more quickly and improve mean team to resolution.
• Training and Education – Rapidly provision lab environments for hands-on training classes
• Product Demos – Demonstrate complex application environments in a reliable and repeatable manner
• Software Evaluations – Improve lead conversion rates with online evaluation portals powered by Lab Manager

Using VMware vCenter Lab Manager:

VMware vCenter Lab Manager allows IT to provide non-IT users with on-demand access to shared virtual resources. Application owners, development and testing teams, support and training organizations can create, deploy and reconfigure multi-tier system configurations in seconds. Self-service management with policy-based access control reduces administrative burden and infrastructure management costs, and empowers businesses to deliver new or updated applications rapidly and with greater agility.

Application Development and Testing
VMware vCenter Lab Manager streamlines application development and testing by giving every engineer the equivalent of his or her own personal datacenter. In a matter of seconds, Lab Manager deploys, captures and shares any system configuration, enabling teams to prototype new applications rapidly; test software releases on a broader range of system configurations; and capture, reproduce and resolve defects more easily. The Lab Manager API and integrations with leading test and build management tools provide additional automation benefits to allow for continuous testing and integration of software applications, shortening delivery schedules and improving software quality.

Release Management
IT Operations and Application Owners responsible for production releases use Lab Manager to eliminate the risk of failed production system updates. With Lab Manager, it is easy to create faithful replicas of production systems for patch testing and seamlessly transition updated system configurations across testing, staging and production environments connected to different networks, server and storage systems. Lab Manager allows release teams to update production systems more quickly, shorten maintenance windows and avoid downtime.

Support and Helpdesk Operations
VMware vCenter Lab Manager enables your entire support organization to rapidly retrieve software releases and host platforms, recreate customer environments, and share those environments with other teams. As a result, support engineers troubleshoot problems and close tickets more quickly, increasing customer satisfaction.

Training and Education
VMware vCenter Lab Manager makes it easy to set up, tear down and re-image lab equipment to support hands-on learning with minimal effort from the IT organization. Instructors can quickly deploy virtual lab systems to their students, and create and update virtual machines shortly before each class. Students can interact with their lab systems directly through the Web browser from any computer with network access, suspend the virtual training environment and continue at a later time.

Software Demonstrations
Technical sales and demo teams rely on Lab Manager to give software product demonstrations in a reliable and repeatable manner—product demos will work every time. Users can access system configurations remotely through a secure connection to the corporate network, making demo equipment portable and available around the clock. The Lab Manager API allows tight integration with corporate websites to provide demo environments for software evaluations online. Lab Manager improves user experience, shortens sales cycles and contributes to top-line revenue growth.

How Does VMware vCenter Lab Manager Work?

VMware vCenter Lab Manager is a server application that provides an easy-to-use, Web-based portal through which users can provision, control and share virtual machines in seconds. IT staff remains in control of access rights, storage quotas and deployment policies.

Integral to Lab Manager is an image library to provide quick access, capture and sharing of virtual machine configurations. Images can be stored “in state,” allowing users to recreate pointing- time configurations with the click of a mouse. By storing images in a central repository, data de-duplication techniques and role-based access control, Lab Manager reduces storage footprints and contains storage growth.

Tightly integrated with VMware vSphere™ and VMware vCenter Server, Lab Manager automates repetitive provisioning and ad-hoc management tasks for IT, avoiding resource conflict in a multi-user environment. Lab Manager optimizes utilization of shared resources by automatically reclaiming server and storage capacity no longer needed by end users.

Key Features of Lab Manager:

VMware vCenter Lab Manager is the most trusted, proven and widely deployed lab management software in the world. Now in its 4th generation, Lab Manager leads the industry with best-in-class performance and scalability, seamless integration with vSphere and vCenter Server, more efficient use of storage resources and more automated management capabilities that simplify IT administration while delivering higher service levels for end users.

Self-Service Portal

 Provide on-demand access to shared infrastructure for non-IT users to create, deploy and reconfigure multi-tier system configurations in seconds without IT involvement. Self-service management reduces administrative burden and infrastructure management costs for IT and empowers the business to execute company strategy, get to market faster and grow top-line revenue.

• Rapid Provisioning: Create, deploy and capture any conceivable system configurations in seconds.
• Configuration Management: Clone, transfer and share environments easily, take system snapshots, or restore a previous state.
• Web-based: Users control and interact with virtual machines via web browser from anywhere on the corporate network.
• Easy to use: Designed for non-IT users to get up and running instantly.

Image Library

 Provides a central repository of virtual machine images for Lab Manager users. System configurations can be captured in state for quick deployment, archival and sharing with other users. The image library stores system configurations in a highly compact format, reducing storage footprints and containing storage growth.

• Linked Clones greatly reduce storage footprints by de-duplicating data in similar system images
• Storage Leases eliminate resource sprawl by reclaiming space from expired images
• Gold Master Configurations allow users to easily identify released images and other reference configurations
• Auto Archive capability simplifies export of system configurations to external datastores.
• Media Store provides a central repository of common installation files and OS images.

Organizations

Simplifies delivery and administration of internal cloud infrastructure, and enable end users to “consume” internal resources in a controlled and predictable manner. IT can dynamically allocate resources to multiple teams, projects and sites, enforce policy-based access control, and reclaims unused resources.

• Workspaces provide a single pane of glass for Lab Manager users to access, create and control system configurations available to them.
• Resource containers map dedicated or shared server, datastore and network environments to groups of users, and can be allocated dynamically or with fixed size.
• Roles & Rights provide granular access control to over 50 Lab Manager commands and properties.
• Quotas & Deployment Leases allow administrators to set policies for the number and length of concurrent VM deployments for users and groups.
• “Live Link” enables sharing of complete application environments as a single URL embedded in an email or bug tracking system.
• Network Fencing allows virtual machine configuration clones to be deployed simultaneously, preserving the original system settings without causing network conflict.
• Host Spanning allows network fenced configurations to be deployed across multiple physical hosts if the VM configuration is too large to fit on a single machine (requires vSphere Enterprise Plus)

Enterprise Scalability

Lab Manager 4 is architected to fit into nearly every environment and scale with the needs of the organization from local to global deployments supporting thousands of users and virtual machines. Moreover, Lab Manager provides industry leading performance and seamless vSphere platform integration to take advantage of the full benefits of the VMware Cloud OS. Flexible APIs and 3rd party integrations provide even higher levels of automation of repetitive, manual tasks.

• Performance optimized so virtual machine configurations can be created in seconds.
• Scalable architecture supports thousands of users simultaneously
• Seamless vSphere and vCenter Server integration lets you take full advantage of the VMware platform benefits
• LDAP support allows IT administrators to integrate Lab Manager with Active Directory and other user authentication systems
• Audit trail and change logs keep track of all user activities in the system
• 3rd Party Integrations available for HP Quality Center, Borland SilkCentral, and Microsoft Team Foundation Server
• SOAP API available for building custom scripts and integrations.

How to Buy:

VMware vCenter Lab Manager
VMware vCenter Lab Manager is licensed on a per processor basis where a processor is defined as a populated socket in a server with up to 12 physical processor cores. Lab Manager requires an adequate number of vSphere Standard, Advanced, Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses and one instance of vCenter Server Standard. 

VMware vCenter Server Standard
vCenter Server is licensed per instance and enables centralized management and deployment of core vSphere features such as VMware VMotion, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, and more.

VMware vSphere Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus
VMware vSphere defines the features enabled for each physical host in the virtual infrastructure. The vSphere editions are licensed on a per processor basis where a processor is defined as a populated socket with one or more physical processor cores. The number of processor cores licensed by the software depends on the edition. VMware vSphere Standard and Enterprise define a processor as up to 6 cores while VMware vSphere Advanced and Enterprise Plus define a processor as up to 12 cores.

Support and Subscription

Support and Subscription (SnS) contracts are available for VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter Server.  One year of SnS is required. 

Documentation:

VMware vCenter Lab Manager Data Sheet (.PDF)