VMLogix is a US startup that entered the virtual lab automation market in October 2006.
Its segment is reasonably empty, with just a bunch of competitors. Unfortunately among those competitors there is VMware and its vCenter Lab Manager.
Despite that, VMLogix always managed to provide valuable features in a timely fashion, like the support for Linux, the support for heterogeneous virtual environments (something that VMware killed as soon as it acquired Akimbi in 2006) or the support for the Amazon Xen-based cloud infrastructure EC2.
The company for sure has no fear of competition, and this provided it a remarkable OEM agreement with Citrix, which now includes the VMLogix flagship product as part of its Essentials package for XenServer and for Microsoft Hyper-V.
Today the company releases LabManager 3.8 which introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (the stand-alone version of Hyper-V).
Additionally the product extends its network fencing engine in two ways:
- the customer can now define some basic firewall rules so that virtual machines can handle inbound/outbound traffic while inside the the lab facility
- the isolated network configurations (IP Zones) can now be applied to multiple virtualization hosts at the same time