David Marshall post on his InfoWorld blog regarding VMware’s lifecycle management announcements from VMworld Europe. David questions the fragmented approach taken by VMware and quote’s VMlogix’s Ravi Gururaj and Surgient regarding how we compete at this level with VMware.
Archive for the ‘lab management’ Category
Management tools are needed
March 17, 2008
Chargeback for Virtual Infrastructure
March 4, 2008
I spoke yesterday to Cameron Sturdevant at eWeek regarding virtual labs and Surgient’s upcoming release schedule. One of the topics we got into was the struggle that IT operations teams seem to have reconciling their current chargeback mechanisms with a more dynamic virtualized environment. I suggested that RAM/hour or some other memory capacity-based approach worked best. Cameron wrote about it on his Permit/Deny blog.
What would a next generation datacenter look like?
February 29, 2008
Dan Kusnetzky at ZDnet talks about virtual lab management and Surgient as a precursor to lights-out fully automated datacenters.
What would a next generation datacenter look like? | ZDNet.com
New VMware Stage Manager tackles application lifecycle management
January 22, 2008Article 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
Your Virtualized State in 2008 – CIO.com
January 9, 2008Laurianne 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.
Virtualization trends in 2007 and industry predictions for 2008
December 31, 2007
At virtualization.info, Alessandro Perilli presents a very nice wrap-up of what was predicted for 2007 versus what really came to pass. One of his comments is that analysts were wrong to suggest that automation of virtual environments would play a strong role in managing virtual resources in 2007. While he’s right that it was not “key” in 07 and certainly he is correct that most virtual resources are not managed in an automated fashion, I really disagree with the overall characterization of automation as unimportant. Certainly much of the buzz currently around virtualization is centered on the automation of virtualization (be it site recovery, orchestration or virtual lab management). Beyond that I believe that automation is a buying impetus as well. I guess we’ll see in 2008!
virtualization.info: Virtualization trends in 2007 and industry predictions for 2008
Surgient’s Future After a Strong Third Quarter
December 3, 2007
David Marshall interviews me in his InfoWorld Virtualization Report blog, regarding Surgient’s recent announcement of a strong third quarter for virtual lab management applicaitons.
Surgient Announces Record Third Quarter
November 29, 2007
Surgient announced that it achieved record growth in the third quarter of 2007. With a record number of new deals in the third quarter, including the company’s first seven figure license deal, Surgient is on pace for 60 percent year-over-year revenue growth. Surgient third quarter bookings grew to almost three times the bookings for the same quarter in 2006.
Webinar: Power Up Application Testing with Virtual Labs
November 16, 2007Surgient and Utopia Solutions will jointly present a webinar on accelerating software delivery with test automation and test lab management.
What: “Power Up Your Application Testing – Accelerate Software Delivery with Test Automation and Test Lab Management”
When: Wednesday, November 28 2007, 11a PT (2p ET)
Speakers: Lee Barnes, founder and CTO, Utopia Solutions and Erik Josowitz, VP Product Strategy, Surgient
Register: https://surgientevents.webex.com/surgientevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=666451502
Electric Cloud, VMware Team Up
November 7, 2007VMware and Electric Cloud announce intent to connect Electric Cloud Commander build-management to VMware Lab Manager. This would allow developers to leverage the virtual lab environment across the development cycle.
Dr. Dobb’s | Electric Cloud, VMware Team Up | November 7, 2007
