View Manager vs Lab Manager

[bjblackmore]

Hi,

We're putting together a proposal for one of our clients, which include some virtualization of their existing development desktops (50). We'd be looking at using VM Infrastructure to do this, but I'm unsure what products to suggest for the deployment of the desktops.

I was going to suggest Lab Manager, as I'd seen a demo at the UK Virtualization expo last year, however, they have come back and asked if we intend to use View Manager. I've looked at both solutions, and they seem very similar. This is a solution for a group of 50 developers who will need standard build desktops provisioned quickly. What are the pros and cons of each?

Lab Manager features says:

"Provision even the most complex multi-tier system and network configurations nearly instantly with VMware vCenter Lab Manager. Give users self-service access to the image library, allowing them to fulfill their own provisioning needs while leaving IT in control of user management, storage quotas and server deployment policies-achieving the best of both worlds."

View Manager says:

"View Manager 3, a key component of VMware View, is an enterprise class desktop management solution, which streamlines the management, provisioning and deployment of virtual desktops."

Many thanks

Ben

[Odurasler2]

We have LM in-house, and if I understood your information correctly, you would probably want to use LM.

Do the developers have old desktop that you are wanting to virtualize them?

Although both can provision VMs very quickly, they have different purposes. For example, in LM, our developers use it to create their own environment without affecting the production environment. Let's say the developer is testing whether the latest MS updates have an effect on his code. He will then go through the process. If during that process, his code breaks he would be able to capture his environment and upload it to a "library" for other developers to see. Other developers can then run this captured environment while the original developer's environment is running at the same time. Again, no effects on other environments.

You see, that's the just 1 capability in LM that you will not be able to achiev in View. hope that helps!

[Rodos]

The two products do very different things.

View Manager is a desktop broker. It provisions desktops for allocation to individual people to use. It is limited in terms of the machines it can create. It does not support creating servers. Machines are sticky, the user keeps it, or its shared randomly as required. I assume it would become difficult to use this for a development environment as in those you are often wanting to give multiple people access to the same environments.If you want to take the PCs of their desks and replace them with thin clients, thats the type of thing you are doing with view.

Lab Manager is a tool that supports the provisioning of servers (or desktops) for the software development process. It works on groups of machines which are typically used in a multi tier application. You can allocate resources to development groups and they can deploy instances of these environments. It includes network fencing so you can run up parallel instances of the same environments even if they all have the same static IP addresses. You can snapshot an instance for debugging purposes and give other developers access to the instance.

The two are really very different products.

Do you have a local VMware Partner or VMware Sales Rep who could give you a quick run down on each.

Of course you could use both, because they each solve or address different issues/requirements.

Let us know how you get on.

Rodos

Consider the use of the helpful or correct buttons to award points. Blog: http://rodos.haywood.org/

[bjblackmore]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the replies, sorry its taken a while to respond, I've been trying to get more information on our clients exact needs.

Basically, the client has 150 developers, split between the UK, and abroad, who write code for their backend databases. Its not application/software development, purely code for interaction between multiple systems, one systems stores the data, and they write code to extract the data, and manipulate it, and 'squirt' it else where.

This means that they won't be testing patches or hotfixes, and the developers VMs don't need to have high availability. They will be basic WinXP VMs, running a development IDE such as eclipse or visual studio. Basically, when a new developers starts, an administrator needs to be able to say "right, this developers is doing this job, and needs this O/S & IDE" then be able to roll out the appropriate VM from a template quickly, without having to build the image from scratch, (which is what happens currently with fat clients). The developers won't be self provisioning their own VMs, or uploading VMs/snapshots for debugging.

From my understanding of your posts, it sounds like View Manager will fulfill our needs - Lab Manager is more for software/application developers who need to self provision and upload snapshots for debugging.

From the provisioning aspect, lets say that an administrator will build a template, i.e. Windows XP Pro SP2 with Visual Studio 2008, and then provisions VMs from this template. Is each developer VM an exact copy of the template, or does it just store the user data and settings? I'm sure I read somewhere that each provisioned VM uses the base template, and just stores the user data. So when you need to upgrade Win XP Pro to SP3, or Visual Studio 2008 to SP1, you only apply the update/hotfix once, to the template VM, and all developer VMs are updated, as they user this template, rather than having to update all 150 VMs individually.

Many thanks

Ben

[Rodos]

With view you can configure it either of the ways you have described.

For the second method where there is central master image with linked clones make sure the environment is capable of and built to be able to support a desktop recomposition.

Rodos

Consider the use of the helpful or correct buttons to award points. Blog: http://rodos.haywood.org/