To help further strengthen VMware's position and story around using their virtualization solutions to help with software development and testing, the company has gone a long way in a short amount of time. With a June acquisition of Akimbi's Slingshot product, an open beta testing that began around October 5th, and now a general availability of Lab Manager 2.4 near the end of December, VMware is finally able to o To help further strengthen VMware’s position and story around using their virtualization solutions to help with software development and testing, the company has gone a long way in a short amount of time. With a June acquisition of Akimbi’s Slingshot product, an open beta testing that began around October 5th, and now a general availability of Lab Manager 2.4 near the end of December, VMware is finally able to offer its “premier virtual lab automation system for development and test organizations”. The lab automation solution is targeted at enterprise software development organizations. According to VMware, the product should help with lab asset efficiency, the acceleration of development and testing cycles, and ultimately increase delivered software product quality. Some of the features being offered include: Multi-Machine Configuration – Create multi-machine configurations in seconds using machine templates – no limit on machine count, no manual adjustments – Act on machines in a configuration as a unit: suspend, multi-snapshot, revert to, shutdown, turn on, turn off, suspend, reset, deploy, undeploy, clone, capture to library, and modify properties Configuration Library – Check out of configurations with memory and CPU state preserved nearly instantaneously – Enjoy simultaneous use of library configurations by multiple users without changing MAC and IP addresses or SID, using VMware’s network fencing Media Library – Store all development and test media in a central repository and tag media with descriptive attributes Deployment – Set up automatic load balancing of machines deployed on host servers and get side-by-side execution of cloned configurations across physical server boundaries, even when IP addresses duplicated on a subnet Machine Templates – Instantly create new machines from templates with distinct personalization – automated assignment of MAC and IP addresses, and SID (for Windows systems) Monitoring – View all deployed machines and see an active unified “in motion” view of server pool and VM operations Administration and Security – Supports LDAP integration as well as user, permission, and quota management VMware Lab Manager Server will start around $15,000 and list prices for the solution bundled with VMware Infrastructure 3 starts at $35,000. Software Development