After spending a week on what should have been an easy project to designing a student lab environment at a well known online university, I am now stumped because of a change in VMware’s Lab Manager 3.0 requirements. Lab Manager 3.0 now requires VirtualCenter which poses a problem because this lab environment is isolated for security reasons away from the administration and production network.
In previous Lab Manager installs, I’ve just setup an ESX host, configured a VM with Windows Server 2003, installed the Lab Manager software and added the host servers for the lab environment. No VirtualCenter was required and it worked perfect on local storage. Now unless businesses are willing to redesign their networks, they will require another VirtualCenter for the Lab Manager 3.0 environment to remain isolated.
Options are: 1) pay the extra $ for the VirtualCenter or 2) install older version of Lab Manager 2.5 (about $1295 per socket) or 3) $0, do without Lab Manager.
Update:
Lab Manager is being phased out and will soon become vCloud Director.
vbeginners.com
You have one more option: Use VMLogix LabManager! It works with VMware ESX and does not require Virtual Center (btw, VMLogix is hypervisor agnostic).
It provides all lab management functionality, and has won key awards beating VMware Lab Manager.
Please find more information at: http://www.vmlogix.com and on our blog at: http://blog.vmlogix.com
– Srihari Palangala
New information has come to my attention:
For VMware customers who can’t upgrade to LM 3.0 because of the VC requirement, VMware will offer a complimentary VirtualCenter license. Please contact your VMware account representative to get more information about this.