Virtual Architect

From virtualization.info:

So far VMware sold its virtual lab automation product, Lab Manager, charging the customers for the server product and each agent installed inside the ESX hosts.

Such model has been completely changed in mid-May as virtualization.info has learned: the new pricing scheme only counts the total number of CPUs inside the ESX hosts managed by Lab Manager.

The price per CPU is fixed at $1,295.
The server component is now free and customers can install in multiple instances.

This is good news to the relatively small businesses. With a small vi3-environment you can have an affordable labmanager setup. Since the server part is not being billed anymore you only have to pay per CPU. Lets say you have a small company which has a virtual infrastructure with a minimum of two ESX hosts (typical two-CPU with dual or quad cores) you will be paying half the price as the minimum before the pricing model was changed.

The previous model was of course based on Labmanager 2.x which had it’s own agent installed on each host. With the upcoming Labmanager 3.0 it is expected to use VirtualCenter instead of the separate agents (Stage Manager which uses the same technology concepts as Labmanager already uses VirtualCenter). In that case there aren’t any agents installed and VMware obviously cannot bill you for something you are not installing. Lets hope the changing in pricing will lead to a higher penetration in the SMB market.

 
Yesterday VMware announced the General Availability of her product VMware Stage Manager.

VMware Stage Manager is a product intended to control an application during the shift from staging into production. VMware Stage Manager solves the problem of server sprawl, configuration drift, and repetitive system testing in pre-production by running IT services and business applications as virtual machine configurations that can be easily transitioned through the release process. VMware Stage Manager allows IT to roll out new and updated applications into production more quickly, avoid the risk of unplanned downtime, and accelerate change requests to production systems.

VMware Stage Manager is available for VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard or Enterprise and can be purchased as part of the VMware Management and Automation and IT Service Delivery bundles, or a-la-carte.

For more info and screenshots of the Beta product take a look at a previous post I made about Stage Manager: Beta Release- VMware Stage Manager 1.0 Beta and on the VMware site: www.vmware.com/products/sm