The panelists gave lots of details about the environments in which they run Lab Manager, but I’ll summarize the key benefits and issues. One customer tests against a huge set of permutations of software, and needed a way to manage the process. Another customer needed to manage the check-in / check-out of virtual machine images used by developers, which had been done via removable hard-drives on a central set of servers. The third customer needed to reduce headcount and overhead in provisioning development environments.
One issue faced is resource allocation. Lab Manager requires lots of IP addresses and lots of SAN storage — or you’ll run out of capacity. While Lab Manager makes it easy to copy VMs and store them efficiently, you still need more resources as you make more VMs, and you need to plan for it. One solution for managing IP addresses is to put a router in front of the lab so that it has its own IP address space. Each customer also had his own method of managing software licenses, including the MSDN subscriptions that their developers used and Windows OS licenses.
Panelists’ large development environments (all three, PGP Corporation, Wonderware, and Princeton Softech, are software development companies) face some common issues, including patching guest OSes — although one customer said that in moving from Akimbi on GSX Server to Lab Manager on ESX Server meant they didn’t need to worry about host OS patching anymore.
Handling VM sprawl is another issue because developers happily provision new machines, but forget to de-provision them when they are done, so they continue to use up server resources. Steve Kishi, VMware Product Manager, helpfully suggested a lifetime policy when a VM is provisioned, so that at the end of its predetermined life, unless explicit user action is taken, the VM gets automatically archived, freeing up the server resources. In the meantime, at least one customer set up an automated notification system warning users their VMs would be archived. Steve also recommended installing Lab Manager and seeing what it uses based on your environment, and then scaling resources appropriately. I guess Steve’s a good salesman, since some one of the panelists and at least one audience member indicated that once Lab Manager is installed, users get hooked and don’t want to give it up.
