Surgient announced three new patents had been awarded. The patents cover fundamental methods of managing and coordinating virtual machines and virtualization infrastructure.
Surgient Awarded Three New Patents for Advanced Management and Coordination of Virtualization
Article from SearchServerVirtualization.com regarding VMware’s recently announced Stage Manager product. The product claims to cover the application lifecycle to help promote applications into and from production. My question is how is this different from Lab Manager?
Confusing to Lab Manager customers? For most enterprise applications, the environment employed outside of production is the test environment. Why would a customer use both VMware Lab Manager and VMware Stage Manager? Stage Manager seems the stronger of the two, and certainly closer to what we do at Surgient with our lab management platform and VQMS. Is this the death of VMware Lab Manager? How will VMware deal with confused customers, especially Lab Manager customers?
VMware only? Then there is the question of a tool that is meant to support enterprise apps but only supports VMware virtualization. Most enterprise data centers are heterogeneous environments, and the majority of applications are not yet deployed in virtualized containers. The shortcomings of Stage Manager seem to be its presupposition that the world be 100% virtualized in the short-term. Most customers we speak to are nowhere near that as a decision or a reality.
What do you think?
New VMware Stage Manager tackles application lifecycle management
Laurianne McLaughlin at CIO has published the results of a survey of 300 CIOs on their use of virtualization. Lots of good data and analysis in the article (link below). Most interesting to me is the responses to the question of why people invested in virtualization:
Reasons to Virtualize Servers
Cut costs via server consolidation 81% Improve disaster recovery and backup plans 63% Provision computing resources to end users more quickly 55% Offer more flexibility to the business 53% Provide competitive advantage 13% (Respondents chose up to three)
SOURCE: CIO Research
From the standpoint of virtual lab management, the fact that 55% of the respondents are trying to accelerate their ability to provision computing resources to end-users is a great sign. It maps to what customers are telling us – they are seeing tremendous returns from automating the provisioning of virtual machines for support, training, testing, proof of concept, evaluations etc. Those conversations suggest that a virtual lab environment is becoming a platform supporting a host of non-production activities that traditionally have been slow, expensive, and considered tactical distractions for the IT ops group. Putting an automated utility in place allows the operations team to spend their time on things that are strategic to the business, instead of being interrupt-driven with deployment and configuration requests.
ZD’s Dan Kusnetzky posts a response to the latest InfoWorld 2008 awards, noting a number of companies is missing. Surgient VQMS was a 2007 winner of the award and Dan notes that virtual lab companies such as VMlogix were skipped this year.
» Response to InfoWorld’s Choices on 2007’s Top Technology | Virtually Speaking | ZDNet.com
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