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VMware Announces Lab Manager 3

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VMware yesterday announced the general availability of VMware Lab Manager 3, a lab automation solution that provides software development and QA engineers with self-service provisioning of multi-VM environments while giving IT departments increased control over policies. With this new release, VMware Lab Manager now offers support for multiple organizational units, advanced networking capabilities, and tighter integration with VMware Infrastructure.

VMware Lab Manager 3 supports multiple organizations of lab users with a single installation, whether users are local or distributed globally. IT administrators can set up customized user roles and access rights to dedicated or shared resource pools imported from VMware VirtualCenter to provide users with the highest quality of service. Because VMware Lab Manager also integrates with Microsoft Active Directory, both user management and resource administration can be centralized to further simplify lab administration and reduce overall resource consumption.

The tighter integration of VMware Lab Manager 3 with VMware Infrastructure 3 allows lab administrators to take advantage of VMware HA, which provides high availability for VMs, and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), which continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among the virtual machines based on pre-defined rules. As a result, system configurations in the lab are more resilient against hardware failures and users are protected from unplanned downtime.

VMware Lab Manager is list priced at $1,295 per processor and is available for purchase through VMware’s global network of distributors, resellers and OEMs starting August 7, 2008. There’s a free download available on the VMware website.

VMware

iWave Software Debuts Automator, Will It Please IT Administrators?

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iWave Software, a 15-year old maker of IT integration software, today announced its entry into the IT process automation market with the introduction of iWave Automator.

iWave Software

iWave Automator is a platform designed to automate data center support processes (run book automation) and to integrate IT system management (ITSM) applications. iWave Automator aims to enable IT organizations to automate, standardize and enforce best practices, lowering their operating costs and improving application availability, while maintaining compliance in their virtualized and physical data centers.

iWave Automator says it provides IT administrators with two options for automating their virtual or physical data center environments. Administrators can use iWave’s graphical process design environment to create automations specific to their organization’s unique business needs or implement iWave Accelerators, pre-built IT automation workflows that automotive specific tasks using ITIL compliant processes.

iWave Automator

The platform consists of the following components:

  • iWave Adapters: iWave offers over 40 pre-built adapters for IT service management (ITSM) applications. iWave Adapters support all of the popular ITSM applications that span the ITIL Service Support disciplines including service desks, event, problem, change, configuration and release management.
  • iWave Accelerators: iWave Accelerators are pre-built workflows that administrators can download and import into their iWave Automator environments. iWave Accelerators help administrators automate common IT management tasks including virtual server management, configuration and compliance management.
  • iWave Designer: A graphical user interface that provides administrators the tools required to create IT process automation workflows and integrations quickly and easily.
  • iWave Management Console: A Web-based console that provides administrators the ability to monitor the health of the iWave Automator environment as well as their ITSM workflows and integrations.