After Akimbi acquisition in June (which has been worth $59 million), VMware is working hard to integrate Slingshot, now relabelled Virtual Lab Manager, in its product line.
Testers candidates have just received an invitation which details reaveals beta is expected to start on October 5th and final release is planned for end of this year.
Surprisingly versioning will continue Akimbi ones, considering the upcoming release as 2.4 instead of 1.0.
Another surprise is the fact this first rebranded release will not able to manage VMware Server 1.0 and will not be integrated with VirtualCenter 2.0.
A third suprise is support for Microsoft Virtual Server, as virtualization.info discovered in an interview with Raghu Raghuram, Vice President of Platform Products at VMware.
If you never approached Akimbi Slingshot you could take a look at Virtual Lab Manager features, watch an old demo and enroll for the beta.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.