Virtualization Tips » Lab Manager

VMware vCloud Director upgrade or exchange program for Lab Manager customers

Brian — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:41:24 +0000

Yesterday while talking about the future of Lab Manager with our VMware rep I found out about a current VMware exchange program that is being offered. If you are a current customer of Lab Manager 4 I would assume you may qualify for vCloud Director licenses in this exchange program. The one gotcha that was explained is that you needed to purchase your Lab Manager before 9/1/2010 but that should not be an issue for most folks. Guessing that most groups would be taking a hard look at vCD before buying Lab Manager these days.

So how does this work out since Lab Manager was sold as normal per socket licenses and vCloud Director is now sold on the new VMware per VM licenses. It breaks down like this for each Lab Manager license you will get 20 per VM licenses of vCloud Director. So if you purchased 6 sockets of Lab Manager that would equal 120 Per VM licenses for vCD.

I personally could not find this promotion on the Partner portal so you should inquire with your VMware rep for details.

VMware Lab Manager how to videos

Brian — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:36:20 +0000

Unless your lucky enough to user Lab Manager on a regular basis then your probably like must Admin’s. When talking with people everyone seems to have a solid idea of what Lab Manger can do but they have little experience in setting up and supporting a LM environment. The team over at VMware KB has created a few videos to showcase and explain some of the core features. You can view them from VMware KB1020915.

VMware Lab Manager 4 is an awersome but complex product

Brian — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:04:26 +0000

I had never really had much time to delve into Lab Manager that deeply in the past. But since version 4 was released and a recent push to implement an environment for a client I have been getting a heavy dose lately. We are running a PoC with Lab Manager to house the Development servers for a large corporation.

The setup and design challenges with Lab Manager make ESX look easy. Sure it sits on top of ESX but the possibilities are endless for the number of configurations that you can establish within the environment. You can configure physical/virtual networks, templates, pools, workspaces and countless other items. All this and the ability to offer a self service option to users with different levels of permissions to restart VM’s and deploy or destroy VM’s.

I will be writing more blog posts on Lab Manager in the weeks to come that will go into more depth on specific features.