VMware Lab Manager is dead. Long live vCloud Director

These virtual times, they are a-changin’. The writing has been on the wall for VMware Lab Manager for quite some time, and now the official word has come down from VMware that it will discontinue development on this dev/test, sandbox lab management software and transition users from Lab Manager to vCloud Director.

We know that technology in the world of IT doesn’t sit still for long, so why would virtualization be any different? Why would VMware rest on its laurels with its lab management product? The story coming out of VMware for the past couple of years has been all about the cloud. Virtualization is no longer a story about the single data center environment. Things have moved onward and upward, and our data centers are moving into someone else’s facility and onto someone else’s equipment. VMware clouds — ready or not, here they come.

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In a recent email to Lab Manager customers, VMware wrote:

We want to provide you with an important update about the vCenter Lab Manager product. As customers continue to expand the use of virtualization both inside the datacenter and outside the firewall, we are focusing on delivering infrastructure solutions that can support these expanded scalability and security requirements. As a result of this focus, we have decided to discontinue additional major releases of vCenter Lab Manager. Lab Manager 4 will continue to be supported in line with our General Support Policy through May 1st, 2013.

As VMware continues to invest in our customers’ journey to cloud computing, we are focusing on delivering secure multi-tenant enterprise hybrid clouds with VMware vCloud Director. vCloud Director is a new software solution that provides the scalability and security necessary to deliver catalog-based self-service provisioning across different workload types, across multiple enterprise tenants, and across both private and public deployment models.

Many users of VMware Lab Manager have been predicting this move and discussing the fact that VMware had become lax about updating Lab Manager. The company hadn’t released a major update since July 2009 when it launched vCenter Lab Manager 4.0. And when VMware officially released vCloud Director at VMworld 2010, this seemed the final nail in the Lab Manager coffin. It was evident the two products were very similar in nature and had quite a bit of feature overlap. Only one could survive, and we all knew which one that would be.

Still, transition from Lab Manager to vCloud Director could prove difficult for some users, especially less advanced virtualization users or small to medium-sized organizations with a watchful eye on their budget.

While Lab Manager supports Microsoft SQL Server Express on the backend, vCloud Director supports a much more expensive database platform, namely Oracle 10g or 11g. This change alone could keep some customers from making the transition. However, this is a 1.0 release, and the product could be expanded over time to include a more cost-effective platform.

vCloud Director 1.0 has a few other technology gaps when compared to Lab Manager. Specifically, some users are concerned over the lack of support for a space-, time-, and cost-saving technology known as linked clones. Linked clone technology provides for multiple copies of a virtual machine to map back to a single parent disk. When a VM is deployed from a linked clone, a delta file is created that stores the changes being made for that specific VM, leaving the shared parent file untouched. In a lab environment, the speed at which a linked clone can be deployed can become paramount. A secondary missing feature of note seems to be Record/Replay, which is a great feature for debugging purposes and important in a dev/test environment being managed by Lab Manager.

There’s also been a question as to whether Lab Manager’s popular network fencing technology has gone away with vCloud Director. The answer seems to be it hasn’t disappeared, but it may have morphed a bit. Lab Manager offers a firewall router VM that provides a key piece of functionality for lab management — namely, network isolation. It was this network isolation or “fencing” technology that allowed for multiple copies of the same virtual machine groups to exist in the same physical environment space without conflict. This fenced-off networking allowed many copies of a lab environment to exist without the fear of an IP address or name conflict occurring.

With vCloud Director, this same functionality is handled by instantiating a vApp template and configuring its network with a FenceMode value of “natRouted” for network isolation. If you’re new to this type of technology, it may take some getting used to. If you are moving over from Lab Manager, it may take some re-education.

Over time VMware will more than likely fill the gaps between these two products. Until that day arrives, will you continue to choose the product that meets your needs today, even if that means selecting a product you know is end of life? Or can you live with the functionality gaps and begin deploying vCloud Director today? Or you may choose to look at third-party solutions, perhaps something like the Surgient product from Quest or maybe the Skytap Cloud.

To help users make up their minds, VMware is offering existing Lab Manager customers who are active on support and subscription (SnS) the opportunity to exchange their existing licenses of Lab Manager to licenses of vCloud Director at no additional cost. This exchange program is entirely optional and may be exercised anytime during Lab Manager’s General Support period.

This article, “VMware Lab Manager is dead. Long live vCloud Director,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.