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Surgient has been one of the first startups to build value on top of virtual infrastructures in the early days of hardware virtualization, well before VMware led the technology to mainstream adoption.

Compared to its competitors, for a long time Surgient offered a hosted virtual lab automation platform.
Only in September 2008 it extended its business model, allowing customers to install the product on-premises.

That first change in strategy possibly depended on the limited interest that the market demonstrated so far in virtual lab automation solutions, despite Surgient has to compete with a really low number of vendors.
The fact that VMware is among those competitors doesn’t help: another company in this space, StackSafe, disappeared leaving no traces in March 2009 after just 15 months of activity. 
Nonetheless Surgient managed to raise a revenue of $1 million per month in 2007 and was fortunate enough to raise a new round funding for $4.3M in August 2009. 

The radical change of direction we are seeing today maybe has its roots in late 2008 when the company launched Virtual Automation Platform (VAP) 6.0, removing specific references to virtual lab automation and featuring a new policy-drive self-service portal that can be used for any sort of virtual machines lifecycle management activity.
Surgient even registered some patents to protect this new part of its platform.

Fast forward to 2010, the company launches a service to build an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) private cloud in less than 30 days for the discounted price of $50,000.

The offering doesn’t say that this private cloud is for virtual lab automation (because it isn’t) and doesn’t even mention which hypervisor will be used (Surgient supports both VMware vSphere 4.0 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V).
The only explicit detail is that their Cloud Express includes 30 managed CPUs.

Implementing a private cloud infrastructure at that price is challenging for anybody. As virtualization.info detailed in one of the first posts of 2010, the whole idea of cloud computing implies not just automation, where Surgient has expertise, but also service level agreements, chargeback, strong security and interoperability.
It must be seen how the company has been able to pack multiple products together to provide all of these capabilities and deliver something that can be really called cloud. 

This post will be updated as soon as we’ll have more information.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Surgient, Virtual Lab Automation

As most virtualization.info readers know by now, Microsoft is finally approaching the .NET developers with a virtualization-friendly edition of its upcoming IDE Visual Studio 2010.

The product will be called Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management, and will integrate Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 to offer a virtual lab automation platform that competes against products like VMware Lab Manager, VMLogix LabManager, Surgient Virtual Automation Platform and others.

Microsoft took forever to leverage its huge MSDN community to let Hyper-V slip into new customers’ sites.
Ironically, the company is doing it right now that VMware, who rules the developers world thanks to Workstation, seems to have lost interest in it.

On top of the new Visual Studio 2010, which may be released in Q2 2010, Microsoft recently released another tool called VM Factory:

Visual Studio 2010 VM Factory is the reference implementation of a software solution that automates the creation of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 virtualized environments. The purpose of this project is to build prescriptive guidance around virtualization of the Visual Studio 2010 and guidance for full automation of the creation of virtual machines using the VM Factory. The goal is to help users with the installation and configuration of virtualized environments with least effort and maximum automation.

The blueprint, which is released under the Creative Commons 3.0 license, includes the following pieces:

• Rangers Virtualization Guidance
  • Focused guidance on creating a Rangers base image manually and introduction of PowerShell scripts to automate many of the configuration tasks.
  • Virtualization guidance looking at the “why” and “how” to use virtualization for Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio, including planning, pre-requisite software, use of non-Microsoft virtualization technologies and introducing use case scenarios.
• Rangers Factory Package and Guidance
  • Reference walk-through documentation on how to install, configure and support a Microsoft internal or an external factory to automate the installation of Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio environments.
  • Microsoft Deployment Toolkit metadata and PowerShell scripts used to create a Rangers factory.

Labels: Microsoft, Virtual Lab Automation

Five months after the first beta, Microsoft is ready to push out the beta 2 of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management, a special version of the popular IDE that interacts with Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 to provide a fully featured virtual lab automation platform.

There’s not really much to say about this new beta, expect reporting a few improvements in the setup and administrative GUI, along with support for network fencing with virtual machines that are acting as domain controllers (this last one is a very welcome addition).

.

The Visual Studio Lab Management team is publishing a number of in-depth walk-through about how to use the platform and how special features (like network fencing) workIt’s really worth a check.

Labels: Microsoft, Virtual Lab Automation

Despite a new $4 million investment secured at the end of 2008, Embotics has been mostly silent in the last few months.

The company released version 3.0 of their lifecycle management product V-Commander at the end of August, but it didn’t introduce groundbreaking new features that show the vision and strategy of the startup.

This sort of information may come from a different front: just before the VMworld 2009, Embotics announced a partnership with Surgient, one of the oldest virtual lab automation firms currently on the market.

Unfortunately the press announcement does everything but explain what this partnership will actually imply.

It may be an OEM agreement where V-Commander embeds part of the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform engine.
It may be a technology agreement where Embotics and Surgient work together to develop a new product that does both VM lifecycle management and virtual lab automation.
Or it may be just a joint marketing effort where the two companies sales teams try to sell the two products as a single bundle.

The press announcement doesn’t even say when the joint effort will actually take place.
But for sure it’s clear that Embotics has an interest in VLA tools, and may move next year to do more than just partnerships.

Labels: Alliances, Embotics, Lifecycle Management, Surgient, Virtual Lab Automation

In June VMLogix announced the upcoming availability of a special version of its virtual lab automation product that could support Amazon EC2.

The product, dubbed LabManager Cloud Edition (CE), was released two weeks ago at VMworld 2009.

While the privacy and security concerns expressed in our previous coverage remain, it is true that VMLogix may be one of the first vendors to set the trend for the coming months: those customers that decide to embrace cloud computing may easily recognize the need for management consoles that extend the 3rd party IaaS architectures to achieve specific tasks such as virtual lab automation.

There are evident benefits:

The position of VMLogix as an acquisition target becomes more and more interesting.
Citrix, which already has an OEM agreement with them to distribute LabManager as part of Essential, for sure must be extremely pleased to see how VMLogix is proficient in manipulating Xen-based cloud computing facilities.

Labels: Amazon, Releases, Virtual Lab Automation, VMLogix, Xen

VMLogix is a US startup that entered the virtual lab automation market in October 2006.

Its segment is reasonably empty, with just a bunch of competitors. Unfortunately among those competitors there is VMware and its vCenter Lab Manager.

Despite that, VMLogix always managed to provide valuable features in a timely fashion, like the support for Linux, the support for heterogeneous virtual environments (something that VMware killed as soon as it acquired Akimbi in 2006) or the support for the Amazon Xen-based cloud infrastructure EC2.

The company for sure has no fear of competition, and this provided it a remarkable OEM agreement with Citrix, which now includes the VMLogix flagship product as part of its Essentials package for XenServer and for Microsoft Hyper-V.

Today the company releases LabManager 3.8 which introduces support for VMware vSphere 4.0 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 (the stand-alone version of Hyper-V).

Additionally the product extends its network fencing engine in two ways:

• the customer can now define some basic firewall rules so that virtual machines can handle inbound/outbound traffic while inside the the lab facility
• the isolated network configurations (IP Zones) can now be applied to multiple virtualization hosts at the same time

Labels: Releases, Virtual Lab Automation, VMLogix

Exactly one year ago Surgient reported profitability after four years in the virtual lab automation market (the company was founded in 2003 but entered the market only in mid-2004).

A couple of months ago a business blog reported that the company scored $1M per month revenue in 2007.
Just a week before this information leaked, Surgient itself reported over 70 active customers.

The company secured $20M in July 2006, but its not clear if that was the first round of funding or not.
Anyway the company needs more cash as it secured $4.3M (only $3M made available at the moment) in a round led by Goldman Sachs, BlueStream Ventures and Crosslink Capital.

A number of additional companies invested in Surgient so far, including investment firms like Austin Ventures, Seaport Capital, SternHill Partners, and MFI Capital (led by Tom Meredith, former CFO, Dell), and private investors like Rod Canion, Founder and former CEO at Compaq Computer, Reed Hundt, Former Chairman at FCC, Bill Joy, Founder and CTO at Sun, John McHale, Co-Founder and CEO at TippingPoint Technologies, and Marc Seriff, Co-founder at AOL.

Labels: Funding, Surgient, Virtual Lab Automation

Today VMware releases the fourth generation of its virtual lab automation tool Lab Manager.

The new 4.0 version (build 1140) introduces the following features:

• Support for multiple workspaces (isolation of resources in multiple workspaces in the same organization, sharing of configurations across different workspaces)
• Host spanning across network fencing (network-fenced virtual labs can see the same host) 
• Resource usage monitor
• Configuration history and archiving
• Support for vSphere 4.0 (excluded VMware FT and Linked Clones technologies)

The new Lab Manager pricing starts at $1,495 per CPU.

The biggest news anyway is that VMware killed the other product derived from Lab Manager: Stage Manager.
Stage Manager was launched 13 months ago and since then received just a single minor update.
At the launch time virtualization.info reported how this product was sharing much of the Lab Manager engine (and even its agents), wondering why VMware didn’t simply extend the former to provide the staging functionalities of the latter.
Over one year later the company seems to finally agree and merges back Stage Manager with Lab Manager 4.0.

The now defunct Stage Manager 1.0.1 is here.

Labels: Releases, Virtual Lab Automation, VMware

The new relationship between VMLogix and Citrix (which is OEM’in LabManager in its Citrix Essentials for XenServer) is generating some interesting developments.

VMLogix announced yesterday the upcoming support for Amazon EC2, the on-demand virtual infrastructure powered by Xen that makes Citrix so proud.

The idea that a virtual lab automation product can create testing and QA virtual machines inside the cloud without wasting money and resources on the on-premises virtual infrastructure is fascinating but not new: Skytap, a younger competitor of VMLogix, is focused on this since day one.

The difference between Skytap and VMLogix anyway is that the former is currently hosting the customers virtual machines on their own virtual data center while the latter is the first virtual lab automation company that hosts them on the most popular (and probably most reliable) 3rd party virtual data center on the market today.

No matter what is the infrastructure backend anyway: like Skytap, VMLogix has to address security concerns and chargeback issues.
Most enterprise customers may be unhappy to manipulate their sensitive data and custom products inside VMs that are somewhere outside the corporate buildings.
On top of that chargeback becomes a must-have feature when you are charged with a pay-per-use pricing model by cloud providers like Amazon.

At the moment LabManager Cloud Edition is available in beta. You can enroll for the program here.

While waiting for the general availability you may want to check this demo or even a whiteboard presentation from the VMLogix CEO that we are featuring on virtualization.tv, the (early beta) virtualization.info TV channel.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation, VMLogix

The few vendors busy in the virtual lab automation space (which include VMware, Surgient, VMLogix, Skytap and the almost died StackSafe) may soon have a big, big problem called Microsoft.

After wasting years not leveraging its huge developers community to spread virtualization in every corner of the world, the company is finally moving on.

Announced in November 2008, the integration between Visual Studio 2010, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 and Hyper-V 1.0/2.0 for virtual lab automation scenarios is now a reality called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.

The product just entered the beta 1 phase and has the potential to become a huge hit in the .NET world.

The Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Lab Management Team has recently started a blog that introduces to the virtual lab automation and the capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 that is well worth a subscription.
Here’s a small excerpt from their first article:

The lab management service in TFS uses System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) for management of lab infrastructure and provisioning of virtual machines across multiple virtualization platforms. You get a copy of SCVMM with Lab Management.

Microsoft Test and Lab Manager is a Windows Presentation Foundation based rich client. The Lab Center in Test and Lab Manager allows you to

• Create and manage virtual or physical environments
• Take environment snapshots or revert to existing snapshots for virtual environments
• Interact with the virtual machines in the environments through environment viewer
• Define test settings for the environments

You can define test plans, test suites and test cases in the Testing Center and execute them on the lab environments.

At the heart of this product there is the concept of the workflow:

Lab Management workflow activities are bundled with Team Foundation Build Service. You can drag and drop these activities in Windows workflow designer to create custom workflows that allow you to

• quickly provision a virtual environment
• revert to ‘clean’ environment in tens of seconds by using environment snapshot instead of running multiple ‘cleanup’ scripts or reinstalling OS and application prerequisites
• using distributed workflow, run setup and configuration scripts on virtual machines
• Take post deployment environment snapshots, etc

This beta 1 is set to expire in mid-April 2010 so it’s very likely that the RTM will be available a few months before that deadline.

Labels: Microsoft, Virtual Lab Automation

In September 2008 Surgient, one of the first startups in the virtual lab automation space, partially re-tuned its strategy, changing the name of its product suite and adopting a new licensing model.

At the end of April 2009 the revamped solution, dubbed Virtual Automation Platform (or VAP, formerly Virtual Q&A Management System or VQMS) received its first minor update.

VAP 6.1 includes the following new features:

• Partial Host Pooling
  Maximize resource utilization and minimize the need for additional hosts with the ability to divide large hosts (RAM, VMs, etc.) across different groups of users and different pools for more granular distribution of today’s larger hosts’ resources.
• License Sprawl Protection
  Actively track and manage the number of licenses used within a private cloud or virtual pool to prevent resource sprawl, assuring license compliance and eliminating excess license costs.
• Third-Party Post Deployment Actions
  Specify post-deployment actions to be executed directly within Surgient environments on deployed physical and virtual servers from Symantec Altiris Deployment Solution or HP Server Automation. Mainly used for patching and upgrading guest OSs, automating load test data, initiation of nightly builds, and other environment customizations, this enhancement allows the provisioning of configurations and other data center automation actions into deployed virtual pools or private clouds.
• Integration with VMware vCenter
  Capitalize on broad functionality and existing investments in templates from VMware vCenter Server by importing and exporting them into the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform with this new integration with vCenter.
• Support for VMware ESXi
  Leverage a broad range of enterprise hypervisor technologies, including VMware ESXi, VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V.
• Customizable User Interface
  Many Surgient customers create private clouds to demonstrate their software offerings to potential buyers. The new version provides functionality to embed company and product branding into the user interface, providing additional marketing benefit from the product.

Interestingly, Surgient is now publishing some information about its business on its website, so we discover that the company, founded in 2003 and active since mid 2004, has a little more than 70 customers (even if some of them are really significant).
So far Surgient had to compete against a very small group of opponents, which unfortunately includes VMware and its Lab Manager (a technology acquired by Akimbi in 2006 for $59 million) and VMLogix with its LabManager, which was selected by Citrix as the OEM partner for Citrix Essentials.
Unless Microsoft or the new potential virtualization giant Oracle are interested in an acquisition, Surgient will have much more to do to survive the competition.

Labels: Releases, Surgient, Virtual Lab Automation

In January 2008 a new startup entered the Virtual Lab Automation market segment: StackSafe (see virtualization.info coverage here).

The company was founded in 2005 with the former name of Revive Systems. It took three years to develop and launch a Xen-based solution to compete against VMware, Surgient, VMLogix and the other VLA companies that arrived later (like Skytap).

A little more than a year ago StackSafe showed a solid leadership team with a strong background on security, as some of the executives were coming from Symantec and Counter Pane.
Now the Board of Directors page only lists the CEO, Loren Burnett, along with the startup funders: Roger Novak, of Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Matthew McCooe, of Chart Venture Partners.

In over twelve months (or over four years, depending on they way you count) the company didn’t impress much for its activity and the virtualization community is barely aware of its Test Center product.
Maybe the funders are looking for a leadership replacement?

Update: It seems that StackSafe planned to raise a Series B funding of $10 Million in 2008 (half of them would be provided by the current investors) but couldn’t succeed.
This may imply that the company is simply running out of money.

Labels: Leadership, StackSafe, Virtual Lab Automation

Skytap (known as Illumita during its stealth mode) is a US startup that entered the (almost empty) virtual lab automation market segment in April 2008 (see virtualization.info coverage).

While one of the leaders in this space, Surgient, was moving away from the hosted infrastructure approach, Skytap was offering its technology as Software as a Service (or virtual lab automation in a cloud if you like).
The only other virtual lab automation firm that is pursuing this business model is StackSafe, another startup launched in January 2008.

In over one year nor Skytap neither StackSafe have impacted the development & testing market in a significant way.
In part this depends on the ubiquitous presence of the worst possible competitor, VMware, and in part on the fact that the cloud computing excitement doesn’t equally apply to every aspect of the IT.

Anyway now Skytap has secured an additional $7 Million round of funds from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation.
Of course investing this money despite the tough economy makes sense as Skytap, more than others, has a chance to get some serious exposure at the peak of the cloud computing hype.

Labels: Funding, Skytap, Virtual Lab Automation

Finally Microsoft has decided to leverage the opportunity that its huge developers community represent for virtualization.
The company announced that the next version of its IDE, Visual Studio 2010, will seamlessly work with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to offer a complete virtual lab automation solution.

Specifically, the VLA feautres should appear in the Team System version of the product, now available as Community Technology Preview (CTP).
And because SCVMM supports 3rd party hypervisors (namely VMware ESX) the developers will be able to use them for VLA environments.

Microsoft published an interview with a couple of VS2010 program managers, talking about the new features and showing them in action.
There’s also a PowerPoint slide deck, presented at the Microsoft PDC 2008 conference, that it’s really worth to check.

The companies that compete in this segment are VMware (which acquired Akimbi in 2006), Surgient, VMLogix, and the newcomers StackSafe and Skytap (this last one only offers a hosted VLA service), but it’s VMware that really won the heart of developers so far through its desktop product Workstation.

Since years Workstation offers enhanced capabilities to do software development and testing, and they go much beyond a needful snapshot manager.
With Workstation 6.0 for example VMware introduced a powerful Record/Replay feature, and with the 6.5 upgrade the product also sports a dedicated set of APIs called VAssert, for code debugging.

So far Microsoft did nothing to counter VMware in its own territory, and this allowed the competitor to enter in a number of companies thanks to the end users rather than through the decision makers.
Through the developers community VMware built a brand awareness that it’s now very hard to weaken. It’s good that Microsoft finally decided to do something, despite 2010 still seems too far away.

Labels: Microsoft, Virtual Lab Automation

Surgient, one of the first startups in the Virtual Lab Automation segment, announced the new version of its platform, which will feature a new name and a new licensing model.

Once known as Virtual Q&A Management System (VQMS), the product is now called Virtual Automation Platform.
This name change immediately clarifies where Surgient is going: the recently won new patents reveal that the company is working to bring its virtual data center automation technology outside the small realm of virtual labs.

The new product in fact now features a policy-driven self-service portal that can be used for any kind of virtual machine provisioning.
VAP 6.0 also introduces support for physical provisioning meaning that Surgient aims at controlling all aspects of the data center.

Three important technologies will be supported by the new product: Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0, Microsoft Active Directory and IBM Rational BuildForge.

As known since a couple of weeks already, Surgient is also extending its licensing strategy, adding to its hosting model a more traditional onsite installation model. The price starts at $25,000.

Surgient VAP 6.0 will be available on Sep. 30.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

One of the oldest startup in the virtual lab automation segment, Surgient, is now profitable as reported by the Austin Business Journal.

The key for this revenue boost was the decision to change the go-to-market strategy.
Surgient used to host the lab infrastructures of its customers and this approach may raise security and availability concerns.

Last year the company started to sell software licenses for in-site installations and won big customers like SAP and Siemens.

The story is interesting as other just-born startups in this and other segments are trying the hosting model right now: Skytap (virtual lab automation) and Lanamark (capacity planning) are two good examples.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

In just one month VMLogix upgrades its virtual lab management product, LabManager, from version 3.5 to version 3.6.

As promised last month, this new version will introduce the support for Hyper-V 1.0.

It’s a major achievement for VMLogix as the company is the first in its segment to offer the new Microsoft hypervisor.

The company published a demo of LabManager 3.6 beta working with Hyper-V hosts (warning: the audio is awful).

At the moment there’s no public beta program to enroll.
The product is expected to be available by September 2008.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

After appointing a new CEO, Sameer Dholakia, in October 2007, the startup VMLogix continues its expansion and hires other two key executives.

The first, Mark Pileski, is one of the people behind the success of PlateSpin (acquired by Novell in February):

VMLogix, Inc., a leading provider of virtual lab automation solutions that help software companies and IT organizations leverage virtualization to consolidate lab infrastructure and automate build and test processes, today announced that Mark Pileski and Leandra Yanagawa have joined the company as vice president of marketing and vice president of worldwide sales, respectively.

…

Having spent more than 10 years helping grow software companies, Pileski brings a wealth of marketing experience to VMLogix. He was most recently director of corporate marketing for Novell, which he joined with the acquisition of PlateSpin. Pileski joined PlateSpin in January 2005 as one of the founding members of the PlateSpin marketing team and built an award-winning group which received an International Business Award for Best Marketing Organization in 2007.

…

As vice president of worldwide sales at VMLogix, Yanagawa will be responsible for leading direct and indirect sales efforts. For the past two years, she has acted as an executive advisor for several startup and venture capital projects focused on providing market assessment and defining sales strategies. Prior to this role, Yanagawa was vice president of inside sales for the EMC Software Division where she successfully rebuilt and developed an organization of more than 170 sales people dedicated to prospecting, qualifying, closing, and renewing opportunities representing over $500 million in annual revenue…

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

With much delay virtualization.info covers the release of VMLogix LabManager 3.5.

The new version was released in May, introducing a key feature: the support for Citrix XenServer 4.1.
In this way VMLogix becomes a full cross-platform virtual lab automation solution, already supporting VMware and Microsoft products.

LabManager 3.5 also includes some major enhancements to virtual networking management and the user interface.

Download a trial here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Releases, Virtual Lab Automation

On his corporate blog Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM, published a new post about the recently acquired VirtualBox, this time focusing on how virtualization can simplify the software development lifecycle.

The article is pretty generic but contains two key informations.
First of all the included slide implies that VirtualBox virtual machines will be importable in the upcoming Sun hypervisor xVM Server.
Secondarily, the fact that Wilson put so much emphasis on the topic today means that Sun already recognized a big opportunity to leverage virtualization for its JAVA developers communities. And this implies that Sun may be looking for virtualization companies focused on the so called Virtual Lab Automation segment.

The only companies in this space are VMware (after the Akimbi acquisition), Surgient, VMLogix and the newcomers StackSafe and Skytap.
StackSafe is the only one in this list that supports Xen at the moment (despite VMLogix is coming) and since xVM Server is based on Xen it may be an interesting target.

In any case this interest is very positive: besides Microsoft, which is wasting the MSDN opportunity since a long time, Sun is the only other major vendor which has enough influence on the developers to successfully sell virtualization for software development lifecycle.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Surgient, the US-based startup focused on the virtual lab automation market since 2003, loses today its historical Vice President of Marketing: Erik Josowitz.

Josowitz, which was the public face of Surgient since the early beginning, will continue to work for a while in the company as strategic advisor, will be replaced by Craig Parks.

Parks comes from a completely different industry, covering the Chief Marketing Officer role in Biophysical Corporation since 2005.

So far Surgient didn't release a press announcement about the take-over and Erik Josowitz profile is still in place.

Update: Surgient just published an official statement about the take-over.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

The virtual lab automation market starts to become packed. It doesn't reach yet the levels of the VDI market, but the number of startups in this space is growing at a good pace.

Today the US company once known as Illumita leaves the stealth mode as Skytap and announces Virtual Lab.

Skytap is based in Seattle and funded with $6 million from four VC firms: Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners, Washington Research Foundation and Bezos Expeditions.

The company, around 20 employees, is managed by several execs coming from companies owned by HP: Scott Roza as CEO (was in Opsware), Steve Brodie as CMO (was in Mercury Interactive) and John Janakiraman as CTO (was in HP Labs).
Additionally, there are a couple of other execs from Microsoft (Ian Knox and Jed Stafford) and from EMC (Matt Perrine).

Skytap has to compete with veterans in the space like VMware, Surgient and VMLogix, as well as with new entries like StackSafe.

Virtual Lab has the traditional features that a customer expects in a product in this category: a web-based console for hassle-free access, a virtual machine library, the capability to tie together multiple virtual machines in multi-tier configurations, instant sharing capabilities through URLs, granulary access permission and quota assignment system, etc.

There's a difference anyway from products like VMware Lab Manager and VMLogix LabManager: Skytap hosts the backend virtual infrastructure on its own.

The only other company doing that at today is Surgient, which also offer an installable version of its VQMS.

This implies that customers don't have to care about the backend configuration but just to create the virtual machine they need or upload the ones they already have: the product currently supports VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer but the company also plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V.

This model also implies that customers have to trust Skytap in uploading their software on the cloud.
Additionally, since they don't have control on the hardware itself, it's impossible to do performance or compatibility tests.

Skytap has published a pretty extended screencast (divided in four parts) to show how the actual product works in different tasks. It deserves a look.

Customers are and are billed per use (actually by paying a monthly subscription) and while the pricing doesn't seem set in stone yet, the current amount is $100/month plus $1/hour per virtual machine usage.

The product can be tried immediately despite Skytap is starting with a small infrastructure probably and can only serve a limited amount of customers. Sign up here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

With the upcoming release of new Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, now in Release Candidate status, several virtualization firms usually linked to VMware are reconsidering their technology partnerships.

Surgient, a popular vendor focused on the so called Virtual Lab Automation market segment, is one of the first announcing its support for Hyper-V.

The first version of Surgient VQMS, just reached 5.4 version, is expected for Q4 2008.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Surgient releases today the newest version of its virtual lab management platform.

VQMS 5.4 introduces a set of APIs for integration through SOAP, support for VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VMFS shared LUNs, as well as support for Apple Mac OS X client.

The price begins at $15,000.

Download a trial here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

The still calm Virtual Lab Automation market, where only three major companies use to compete (VMware, Surgient and VMLogix), welcomes today a new player: StackSafe.

Founded in 2005, the US startup enters the virtualization world with 20 people and a product, Test Center, which features a web-based management interface and supports both VMware ESX Server and Citrix XenServer platforms. Besides that the company doesn't provide much more details about the internal virtual architecture behind the product.

StackSafe offers a cold P2V migration utility to import production servers inside the Test Center. The product is available at $50,000 for an annual subscription.

The company has an impressive focus on security.
The management team has some relationship with Symantec: Loren Burnett, company's CEO, helped selling its previous firm (Riptech) to the security giant in 2002, while Jonah Paransky, Vice President of Marketing, worked in Symantec as Director of Product Management for Global Managed Security Services.
Additionally, StackSafe Vice President of Engineering, Carolyn Turbyfill, comes from the popular security firm Counterpane (of Bruce Schneier fame), acquired by British Telecom in 2006, where she covered the same role.
Even Board Advisors feature strong knowledge on security, with representatives from George Mason and Columbia universities, as well as from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The company is funded by Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Chart Venture Partners.

Both the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar and the Virtualization Industry Roadmap have been updated accordingly.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

An aspect of IT where virtualization can bring remarkable benefits is software development and testing. Few companies are busy in this space, called virtual lab automation, and each one provides support for VMware and Microsoft platform. One of them, Akimbi, was even acquired in June 2006, and its technology is now the foundation for VMware Lab Manager and the new Stage Manager.

So far customers adopting Xen-based hypervisors were unable to buy one of these solutions, but today VMLogix introduces a version of its LabManager working with Citrix XenServer.

VMLogix LabManager for XenServer is available now and pricing starts at $25,000.

Download a trial here.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Hardware virtualization allows an unprecedented level of flexibility in modern datacenters which can be combined with many degrees of automation. Depending on the purpose this automation is shaped in different tools for different markets.

The very first application has been the so called Virtual Lab Management, a segment where VMware, Surgient and VMLogix are busy today. But a second one is emerging these days: the VM lifecycle management.

On the long term it's easy to imagine how the today's Virtual Lab Mangement vendors will start offering VM Lifecycle Management solutions and vice versa.

A recent set of patents secured by Surgient seems to confirm this vision:

Surgient, the market leader in virtual labs that power solutions for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that it has been awarded three new patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Reinforcing its technical leadership in the virtual lab management market, the three new patents cover technologies that enable Surgient customers to better allocate, manage and organize virtualized resources used to accelerate the software development and delivery lifecycle.

...

The three patents were awarded during the past year. The technologies covered by the patents were developed entirely by Surgient's research and development team. The patents include:

• US Patent #6,990,666
  "Near Online Server"-Describes a method for providing fractional burst capacity in delivering virtual computing resources from a centralized, shared server resource pool.
• US Patent #7,257,584
  "Server File Management"-Describes a method for providing portability of virtual server "snapshots" across physical server hosts. One of the underpinnings of Surgient's library management server, this patented technology provides greater flexibility when developing, managing and deploying virtual machine images.
• US Patent #7,287,186
  "Shared Nothing Virtual Cluster"-Describes a method for organizing virtual machine resources for rapid recovery, such as that required by advanced disaster recovery, reduced power consumption or business continuity scenarios. Enables virtual machines to dynamically move across physical hosts without requiring data to be moved or copied.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management Applications for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that it achieved record growth in the third quarter of 2007. With a record number of new deals in the third quarter, including the company's first seven figure license deal, Surgient is on pace for 60 percent year-over-year revenue growth. Surgient third quarter bookings grew to almost three times the bookings for the same quarter in 2006.

Surgient signed several new customers, including Genesys Labs, Halliburton Landmark Graphics, Raymond James, Serena, Ultimate Software and Vontu. The company saw repeat business from BMC , CA , Dell, EMC, Information Builders, Kana and Target Corporation...

Quoting from the Cirba official announcement:

CiRBA Inc., a leader in Data Center Intelligence, today announced that 2007 marked a year of tremendous growth in the emerging virtualization and consolidation planning software market as server sprawl, space constraints and power consumption force enterprises to take a more holistic and critical view of their data centers. CiRBA highlights from 2007 include the release of CiRBA versions 4.0, 4.2, 4.4, and 4.5, customer growth of over 130%, a new European presence, key strategic partnerships, as well as the industry's most prestigious award recognitions...

Labels: Capacity Planning, Virtual Lab Automation

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management Applications for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that Saba Centra 7.6 will be fully integrated with the Surgient Virtual Training Lab Management System (VTMS), enabling Saba Centra training administrators to schedule, create, launch and tear-down virtual labs for hands-on application training and exercises. The combined solution is designed to reduce training costs by minimizing travel to physical training locations and increase operational efficiency by accelerating time-to-delivery of new courses.

Saba Centra is a complete online learning and collaboration solution that provides a highly interactive, real-time learning environment. The integration with Surgient VTMS will empower Saba Centra users with the ability to automate the set-up, deployment, configuration and tear-down of complex software environments used to provide real-world software training labs...

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Quoting from the VMLogix official announcement:

VMLogix, Inc., a global provider of virtual infrastructure management technology to streamline the software development lifecycle, today announced the appointment of Sameer Dholakia as chief executive officer. Sameer brings extensive experience in the enterprise software industry having held key leadership roles in product management, sales, and business development, and will lead the company as it expands its team and global operations.

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Prior to VMLogix, Dholakia held numerous positions at Trilogy, Inc., most recently managing west coast operations in the U.S. where he established the company's consumer electronics vertical and expanded its install base in the automotive industry. During his tenure with the company, Dholakia also served as VP of Alliances where he managed an organization responsible for developing Trilogy's strategic partnerships. He began his career with Trilogy in product management, leading the creation of the company's second major application business. Dholakia received his bachelor and master's degree from Stanford University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Palo Alto with a strong engineering team in Bangalore, India, VMLogix has also recently opened an office in Toronto, Canada, and plans to expand staff in sales, client services and support...

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

After announcing new version of its virtual lab management solution, VMLA 5.3, in June, Surgient finally releases the product and, for the first time ever, allows potential customers to download a part of it (the Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System or VQMS) directly.

Download a 45-days trial of VQMS 5.3here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Same day XenSource announces its new XenEnterprise 4.0, VMLogix announces it will provide virtual lab automation for this platform as well, after already consolidated support for Microsoft and VMware:

VMLogix, a leading provider of virtual lab automation solutions that help software companies and IT organizations leverage virtualization to consolidate lab infrastructure and automate build and test processes, today announced a strategic partnership with XenSource, the leading provider of enterprise-class virtualization solutions based on the high-performance open source Xen virtualization platform. As part of this relationship, VMLogix announces support for XenEnterprise V4 in VMLogix's flagship product, LabManager. The combined solution will offer a cost-effective, enterprise-class alternative for virtual lab automation...

VMLogix is also about to start a related beta program, which can be enrolled here.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

After just one month since version 2.8, virtualization startup VMLogix launches today third major release of its lab management solution LabManager.

This new build mainly introduces support for VMware Infrastructure 3 and new guest OSes like Microsoft Windows Vista and Sun Solaris 10.

Download a trial version here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management Applications for software testing, training and evaluation , today announced the appointment of Tim Lucas to the position of President and Chief Executive Officer. Formerly Surgient's Chief Financial Officer, Lucas brings more than 18 years of operating, financial and professional services leadership experience and a strong commitment to customer success to the CEO position. Lucas replaces former Surgient CEO Bill Daniel, who remains with the company in an advisory role.

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Prior to joining Surgient as CFO, Lucas held key executive roles throughout the technology industry which broadened the scope of his experience as a management executive. He was director of finance for the fastest growing business unit of SAS Institute, Inc., the largest private software company in the world. In this role Lucas was the lead financial executive responsible for a business with revenues in excess of $200 million dollars per year. Lucas also served as Vice President of Consulting and Senior Director of Operations at Red Hat, Inc., where he reorganized the consulting practice and founded the company's global professional services practice, changing the delivery approach from technology-centric to one focused on client needs.

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Prior to Red Hat, Lucas was the Vice President and CFO of Akopia, Inc., where he managed finance and operations for the provider of open source e-commerce software and services from the start-up phase through a period of rapid growth, leading to its acquisition by Red Hat. Lucas also brings experience in leading a company through an initial public offering, as he successfully did for Petroglyph Energy...

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management applications for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced that the Surgient Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System (VQMS) is being resold by HP as a component of the HP Quality Center.

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Surgient VQMS consolidates pre-production infrastructure and automates the provisioning of test configurations on-demand. HP Quality Center integration enables testers and testing tools to reliably request and securely access test configurations 24x7...

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

After VMLogix, another company working on virtual machines provisioning segment, Surgient, announces an updated for its solution.

In this new release of Virtual Lab Management Applications Surgient introduces following features:

• Advanced, agentless networking
  Unique to Surgient, NAIL Server enables complex networking between guest images without requiring a management agent, accelerating deployment and allowing the virtual lab environment to more effectively replicate a wider array of production configurations.
• Universal Remote Access 2.0
  With a higher performing remote access and firewall transversal system, Surgient v5.3 provides enhanced global access to a centrally deployed virtual lab anytime, from anywhere.
• Advanced Calendaring System
  An advanced calendar capability allows lab managers to adequately schedule and keep track of current and future lab usage and reservations. Version 5.3 also features improved lab reporting that enables metered self-service.

Surgient Virtual Lab Management Applications, version 5.3, will be available starting August 2007 and support both VMware ESX Server 3 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. Workgroup pricing begins at $35,000.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

The virtualization startup VMLogix silently released a new version of its LabManager.

In this new release VMLogix, which is showing up a completely new website, introduces two very interesting capabilities:

• IP Zones Capability to deploy several virtual machines with identical network settings (and Windows SID) without conflicts
• Shared Snapshots Capability to share any virtual machine (or group of them) snapshot within your team with just a link

Download a trial here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Quoting from the VMLogix official announcement:

VMLogix, a provider of virtual infrastructure management technology to streamline the software development lifecycle, today announced its support for the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform, including out-of-the-box integration of VMLogix LabManager with IBM Rational Build Forge.

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IBM Rational Build Forge automates the software build and delivery processes while LabManager automates the provisioning and management of physical and virtual machine images...

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management applications for software testing, training and evaluation, today announced the appointment of Fred C. Pazos to the position of vice president of worldwide sales.

Prior to joining Surgient, Pazos was vice president of sales and marketing for Exadel, a privately-owned software services and products company that provides rich application components to create business applications. At Exadel, Pazos developed and implemented a successful strategy to increase on-line sales that resulted in 275 percent growth in a 12 month period. Before Exadel, Pazos was vice president of sales and services at Everdream Corporation, where he developed alliances that grew the company’s channel business from zero to 35 percent in the first 18 months. Pazos also held vice president, sales roles at Intraware, a publicly-traded software company that provides electronic software licensing and delivery solutions. His experience also includes senior sales and marketing roles at IBM, Wyse Technologies and Hitachi America...

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Quoting from the Surgient official announcement:

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management Applications for automating software demo, test and training labs, today announced that it achieved record company results in 2006, closing more than five million dollars in sales in the fourth quarter alone. New customer wins, growth with current customers, technological advances, expanded partnership agreements, and new venture funding aided in making 2006 an overwhelming success...

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

The young startup VMLogix recently entered in the virtual datacenter automation segment with its LabManager, competing with the market leader VMware.

Last week the company released a small minor release to LabManager, reaching the 2.6.1 version, which introduces a great change: support for Linux.

One critic VMware received from customers in these years is that its administration tools, including VirtualCenter and the new Lab Manager acquired from Akimbi, are not available for the open source platform.

VMLogix has now a chance to raise customers' interest providing an alternative.

LabManager 2.6 is available for download here.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

• Import Template from VMFS You can import a template and its virtual machine files from VMFS (ESX Server) storage. Lab Manager already allows you to import templates from SMB storage
• Export Template You can export a template and its virtual machine files to a directory on the network.
• Export Configuration You can export a configuration and its virtual machine files to a directory on the network
• Consolidate Template After creating multiple clones, you can consolidate the delta disks that may affect performance into one disk
• Move Storage Administrators can move the contents of a SAN (VMFS) storage server to another server
• Delete Storage Administrators can delete SAN (VMFS) storage servers from Lab Manager. This operation does not delete the files on the storage servers
• Use NFS media storage You can add NFS media storage and synchronize the contents of that media storage with the Lab Manager media library

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

After 1 month of beta testing, the virtualization startup VMLogix is ready to enter the so-called virtual lab management market, challenging the market leader VMware and its unique competitor at the moment: Surgient.

The VMLogix product, Lab Manager, has same name of VMware one but at the moment has a different focus, putting more attention to SMB than enterprise customers.

This first release offers following features:

• Virtualization Support
  Comprehensive native support for Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware Server
• Physical Hardware Support
  Provision bare metal hardware effortlessly with multiple partitions in any format (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, swap, ext2, ext3), specify partition size and set partition boot order
• Automated & Manual Testing
  Seamless support for complete process automation and also flexibility to allow user intervention at all phases. Avoid tedious work with both manual and automated testing scenarios
• Synchronized Multi-Machine Tests
  Configures test scenarios involving multiple machines in varying roles, and provides test script synchronization across these machines
• Multi-Platform Support
  Supports all major Microsoft Windows platforms (MS-DOS, 95, 98, NT4, 2000, 2000 Server, XP, 2003 Server & respective service packs) and all popular Linux distributions (RedHat, SuSE, Ubuntu, CentOS)
• Built-In Remote Access
  Integrated remote access (Microsoft Remote Desktop/VMRC, VNC ActiveX, VNC Native Viewer) enables users to monitor and control test machines directly from their desktops and via embedded controls in their browser
• Tracking & Reporting
  Detailed logs of all system & job activities provides high degree of management and visibility into the health & utilization of infrastructure and adherence to prescribed development & QA processes
• Instant Notifications
  Email & SMS notifications are generated for events of interest (e.g. test script failures)
• Global Multi-Site Development Model Support
  Replicate, synchronize and share libraries of configurations among multiple teams, locations and even your offshore development centers and outsourcing partners
• Import & Export
  Test definitions can be exported and archived along with project source code & test scripts
• License Management
  Software and OS license usage on test machines can be monitored and compliance enforced (admin configuration option)
• Flexible Scheduling
  Test runs can be automatically scheduled for specific date/time, on periodic intervals (hourly, daily, weekly), or based on events (completion of builds) or FIFO, making it simple for teams to automate repeated runs
• Cost Allocations
  Test infrastructure usage is carefully tracked via fine grained ownership & user ids to which allows organizations to build accurate cost allocation reports by project or business unit
• Security Controls & Audit Trails
  Strict authentication (built-in, Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP) and role-based access control backed up by a comprehensive audit trails ensures system integrity
• Wake on LAN
  Have test machines powered off & on automatically, allowing idle hardware to be safely turned off, lowering power and air-conditioning costs

Support for enterprise environments will arrive in early 2007, when VMLogix will start supporting VMware ESX Server.

LabManager 2.6 is available for download here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management Applications for automating software test, training and demo labs, and PlateSpin Ltd. today announced a co-development and co-marketing agreement in which PlateSpin’s PowerConvert OS Portability technology will be integrated with Surgient’s Virtual Lab Management Applications. ... Today, customers can use Surgient’s Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System (VQMS), Virtual Training Lab Management System (VTMS) and Virtual Demo Lab Management System (VDMS) together with PlateSpin’s PowerConvert to capture, convert and import software configurations. Surgient Virtual Lab solutions and PlateSpin PowerConvert are being more tightly integrated with the integrated solution available in early 2007...

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration, Virtual Lab Automation

VMLogix, a global provider of virtual infrastructure management technology to simplify the software lifecycle, today announced that it secured Series A funding from Bain Capital Ventures, one of the world's leading private investment firms, for $3.5 million. ... "Funding from Bain Capital allows VMLogix to further its vision of bringing enterprise virtualization technology to all phases of the software lifecycle," said Gururaj. "VMLogix will use this capital to support ongoing product development and its U.S. go-to-market initiative...

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation

• Full support for virtualization platforms (including all VMware products, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and Xen in the near future)
• Full support for operating systems (including all client and server Microsoft platforms and major Linux distributions)
• Capability to abstract from required virtualization platform (committing template cloning automatically chooses the supported virtualization product for the required image)
• Capability to manage guest OS licenses (binding of correct license to the related guest OS is assisted by a License Manager)
• Capability to automate tasks inside deployed guest OSes (execution of complex script and verification of output or injection of files is available without entering the virtual machine)
• Capability to perform application installations on deployed guest OSes (binding of application installer is possible selecting them from a central repository)
• Capability to deploy virtualization platforms on bare metal (installation of a virtualization platform on real hardware is possible before performing any provisioning task)
• Support for granular permission system (definition of users roles and user teams for any possible task inside the product)

Labels: Virtual Lab Automation