After hitting release candidate status with Workstation 6.0 / Player 2.0 / ACE 2.0, VMware is now focusing on its most recent product, Lab Manager, acquired by Akimbi last year, which just reached 2.5 public beta status.
In this new version (build 212) VMware introduces:
- Automatic Server Pool Cleanup (set policies to undeploy and clean up unused virtual machines)
- Storage Server Maintenance (see how much disk space you could free up by consolidating or deleting virtual machines)
- Managed Server Maintenance (quickly undeploy and redeploy virtual machines on new managed server hardware)
- iSCSI and NFS support for virtual machines repository
- 64bit guestOSes support
- Sun Solaris 10 support
- vSMP virtual machines support
Lab Manager 2.5 release notes also expose an upcoming ESX Server 3.0.2, which will be supported side by side with 3.0.1.
(virtualization.info readers also know VMware is working to release Virtual Infrastructure 3.1 in near future)
Enroll for the beta program here.
VMware also published an introductory paper on virtual lab automation available here.