Recently, I had the opportunity to spend some time speaking with Mark Angelo, Director of Business Development at VMLogix, where we were able to talk about the company's latest release - LabManager 2.8 - as well as discuss the product's support for the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform and the out-of-the-box integration with IBM's Rational Build Forge. One of the great use cases that has recently sprung up Recently, I had the opportunity to spend some time speaking with Mark Angelo, Director of Business Development at VMLogix, where we were able to talk about the company’s latest release – LabManager 2.8 – as well as discuss the product’s support for the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform and the out-of-the-box integration with IBM’s Rational Build Forge.One of the great use cases that has recently sprung up within the IT community is using server virtualization to optimize the complex world of software development and test. Leveraging a solution such as VMLogix LabManager allows software companies to automate the manual process of provisioning build and test environments. Doing so helps streamline the software development lifecycle, which in turn helps companies bring products to market faster and hopefully with less bugs.VMLogix LabManager seamlessly works across diverse virtual machine platforms and physical machine environments, giving developers full process control at all levels within the test environment. After speaking with Mark, I gained a better understanding of how combining VMLogix LabManager with IBM Rational Software would provide an out-of-the-box solution that would help automate the entire creation and deployment process for a fast and repeatable build and test environment. And since LabManager features are accessible through the IBM Rational Build Forge user-interface, it helps accelerate the rate at which build and test scenarios can be executed by distributed teams. IBM Rational Build Forge automates the software build and delivery processes while LabManager automates the provisioning and management of physical and virtual machine images. This ensures the ability to rapidly reproduce, troubleshoot and resolve even the most complex, environmentally sensitive bugs. Some of the features available in LabManager 2.8 include: Heterogeneous Virtualization Support – The product uses industry leading virtualization platforms from Microsoft and VMware, and plans to add to that list with future releases. Synchronized Multi-Machine Deployments – Deploy and synchronize multi-machine test scenarios without user intervention. Launch, suspend, resume, snapshot, revert, reset, showdown, capture, and share these deployments as a single encapsulated unit. Build and Test Automation – Automate build and test execution by leveraging advanced configuration of software, tools, scripts and data at the guest operating system level. Ready for IBM Rational Build Forge. Automation APIs – Integrate LabManager with existing tools and programmatically control all operations using XML/RPC and command-line interfaces. Image Builder – Build and rebuild multi-machine test configurations on-demand without manual user intervention. Shared Snapshots – Capture and share “live” multi-machine configurations from the configuration library. Captured configurations preserve memory and CPU state and can be redeployed instantly. IP Zones – Allow multiple users to safely deploy concurrent copies of suspended multi-machine configurations without changing MAC addresses, static IP addresses or Windows SIDs.You can download a free 30-day trial of VMLogix LabManager, here. Software Development