As expected several new markets segments are opening around virtualization, with a plethora of solutions for automating complex tasks in new virtual datacenters.
The most prominent ones are P2V/V2V migrations, multi-platform virtualization management and finally virtual lab management.
All of them are still pretty immature with few competitors and limited capabilities but will grow in next couple of years and will eventually merge in integrated management solutions for both virtual and physical machines.
The virtual lab management space is becoming more interesting in the last few months, since the acquisition of segment leader Akimbi from VMware.
The previously known Slingshot has been renamed Virtual Lab Manager and will be launched in beta this week.
The only other company in the space, Surgient, just released its new platform version but its focus on hosting services makes it a hard choice for the large majority of customers.
While customers adopting Microsoft or Xen virtualization platform were already loosing hopes to early adopt automation solutions for their QA departments, a new player appeared on the scene: VMLogix.
VMLogix launched in September the first beta of its virtual lab management solution called LabManager.
The new product has several interesting features:
- Full support for virtualization platforms
(including all VMware products, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and Xen in the near future)
- Full support for operating systems
(including all client and server Microsoft platforms and major Linux distributions)
- Capability to abstract from required virtualization platform
(committing template cloning automatically chooses the supported virtualization product for the required image)
- Capability to manage guest OS licenses
(binding of correct license to the related guest OS is assisted by a License Manager)
- Capability to automate tasks inside deployed guest OSes
(execution of complex script and verification of output or injection of files is available without entering the virtual machine)
- Capability to perform application installations on deployed guest OSes
(binding of application installer is possible selecting them from a central repository)
- Capability to deploy virtualization platforms on bare metal (installation of a virtualization platform on real hardware is possible before performing any provisioning task)
- Support for granular permission system
(definition of users roles and user teams for any possible task inside the product)
LabManager 2.6 beta 1 is available here. The final version of the product is expected for early November.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.
VMLogix has been included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.
