Just completed sitting through PAR105 – ware Lab Manager: Technical Sales Overview which ran from 10 AM – 11 AM.

Interesting session although I was a aware of most of this information from some of the briefings I had from Akimbi prior to the ware acquisition. In no particular order here are some of the notes from the session. Note: I was typing very fast and the slides were changing faster so I do not guarantee that this post is 100% accurate.

• ware announced Lab Manager Public Beta 1 today at VMworld 2006
• Defined market space as Virtual Application Automation
• Competition: Surgient
  • Interestingly enough I hit the Surgient web site and on the top of the page there is a quote from EMC 🙂 See final note…
• Lab Mgr Avg Deal Size approximately 30K but this quickly grows to 100s of thousands of dollars
• Cost and Licensing Model
  • Two Specific Models
    • a la carte – 15K per Lab Manager Server + 1K per 2 CPUs
    • Enterprise which will include Lab Manager w/ VI Ent or Std plus VMware Workstation
• Performance concerns associated with VMDK snapshots
  • Yes, there can be performance degradation but it has not been measured as significant
• Automated IP and SID Management
• Creation of vs
  • Checkout from the Lab Mgr library which creates and exact duplicate environment with the same SID but fencing is used to protect the duplicate environment
  • Creation of a new config from a template
    • Unlike VM templates the creation of a new VM using Lab Manager templates does not copy the base disk but it creates a difference disk so the creation is near instantaneous.
• REDO limitations / best practices
  • # of VMDK files per LUN consideration, depends on how you plan to use the system – number of Vicks per LUN is gated by the number of REDO logs per VMDK.
• Target Markets:
  • Enterprise/Commercial IT – > Target Mage >10,000 Employees
    SIs and VARs -> National and Global
    ISVs -> Small, Medium and Large
• Target Customers
  • CxO – Architecture Committee
  • IT Pops
  • Application Dev – Management
• Service Opportunities
  • 2 Day Jump Start
    • Designed to up and running quickly – takes about an hour to get the base system up and going
    • Organizations will require assistance with architecture and design, integration, dvt process, best practice, etc…

As a final note, it was interesting to me during the key note this morning that em’s logo was scarce on the partner slide. In particular there was a software partner slide that had Symantec but not EMC on it. I have to wonder if the thought was that EMC is implied or if it was left off intentionally?