VMware announced the general availability of VMware Lab Manager 3, providing even greater automation and control for IT lab environments. VMware Lab Manager has fast become the industry-standard lab automation solution that provides software development and QA engineers with fast and simple self-service provisioning of multi-VM environments while giving IT departments increased control over policies. With this new release, VMware Lab Manager now offers comprehensive support for multiple organizational units, advanced networking capabilities, and tighter integration with VMware Infrastructure.

As market adoption of virtual lab automation has grown, so has the need to support a diverse set of users. For example, many organizations wish to establish global lab operations that encompass not only software development and test teams, but also helpdesk operations, training organizations and sales teams that use the lab to recreate customer environments, provide hands-on labs or drive sales demos. IT administrators need to ensure consistent quality of service and access to appropriate lab resources based on a user’s role in the organization. VMware Lab Manager 3 supports multiple organizations of lab users with a single installation, whether users are local or distributed globally. IT administrators can set up customized user roles and access rights to dedicated or shared resource pools imported from VMware VirtualCenter to provide users with the highest quality of service. Because VMware Lab Manager also integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, both user management and resource administration can be centralized to further simplify lab administration and reduce overall resource consumption.

“The new organization capabilities in VMware Lab Manager 3 will help us better enforce role-based access rights to system configurations in the lab according to our IT policy,” says Tony Anastasio, technology architect for Cerner, the leading U.S. supplier of healthcare information technology solutions. “We can now roll out virtual lab infrastructure to hundreds of more engineers as well as our training and support teams, and manage it from a central location which allows us to minimize consumption of server, storage and network resources.”

As today’s business applications are getting increasingly complex, service oriented architectures, firewalls, load balancing networks and clustered applications must be simulated and thoroughly tested in the lab. By offering built-in support for multiple physical and virtual networks, VMware Lab Manager 3 simplifies the design of these advanced system configurations and helps lab users better understand complex architectures and troubleshoot difficult network problems.

Around-the-clock availability of lab systems becomes increasingly important with corporate lab infrastructure being used by an expanded set of users including not only software development and test teams, but also helpdesk operations, training organizations and sales teams. Hardware failures must be minimized so as not to wreak havoc on delivery schedules when lab equipment is unavailable due to unplanned downtime, which can often take days or weeks to repair or replace faulty servers, storage or network equipment. The tighter integration of VMware Lab Manager 3 with VMware Infrastructure 3 allows lab administrators to take advantage of VMware HA, which provides high availability for VMs, and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), which continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among the virtual machines based on pre-defined rules. As a result, system configurations in the lab are more resilient against hardware failures and users are protected from unplanned downtime.

“We have development teams working on trading gateways for virtually every major futures exchange around the world,” said Patrick Benson, senior systems engineer for corporate infrastructure at Trading Technologies International, Inc., the leader in electronic futures trading systems. "VMware Lab Manager 3 gives us much more flexibility in the way we deal with a global lab environment. It simplifies administration, supports multiple networks, and lets us assign resource pools and manage user access rights for all of our teams from a central location.”

“VMware Lab Manager has quickly become the industry standard virtual lab automation solution used by software development and testing teams worldwide,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions, VMware. “This new release expands the appeal of VMware Lab Manager to more groups of people at our customers by promoting effective self service combined with centralized IT control."