VMware Lab Manager 2.5

A good tool for organizations that are into software testing and development as it allows you to quickly setup the desired testbed, thereby saving a lot of time and improving productivity

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

This is a good product for all organizations that are into software testing and development. The VMware Lab Manager allows you to create test environments on the fly. For instance, if something goes wrong during a test, i.e. the application crashes, or the OS develops a problem, then the entire setup has to be re-erected from scratch. The administrator has to reinstall everything and reconfigure the machine again for tests. This is a very time consuming task, which wastes a lot of productivity. The VMware Lab Manager 2.5 is an advanced virtual lab automation system, which speeds up the deployment process of virtual test machines. It works in parallel with VMware ESX 3.0 Server, where all virtual machines are hosted and provides an environment to deploy virtual machines and multiple test setups on shared or private basis. You don't require any additional hardware except the server hardware, where you host the virtual test machines.

The software is easy to use. With it an administrator just needs to create templates of virtual machines before-hand and deploy them as and when required . Whenever a test setup has to be created with multiple OSes, you just have to create a workspace for the concerned development team and further associate the virtual machine's template to the workspace. Then you can provide access of this virtual lab to the test team via Remote Desktop protocol (in case of Windows) and shell access (in case of Unix or Linux ). Features of this manager include provisioning, cloning, rapid deployment of virtual machines, support for Fiber channel SANs, iSCSI and NFS storage, and expanded OS support. With it we could use 64 bit and virtual SMP guest OSs for deploying and managing virtual machines. Moreover, we could capture a machine's configuration in an error state, so that the test team can troubleshoot and determine the cause of error. One can even provide remote access of his virtual test lab setup to his outsourced partners.

Deployment of a created OS template took less than a minute. We created a Windows 2003 Server and Cent OS template, and deployment of both took 57 and 35 secs respectively. This would have consumed several hours if we had to do it on a real machine.

Bottom Line: A good buy for software development firms, where stress testing of their applications is a must.

Page(s)   1