VMware Lab Manager VS Virtuozzo

Lab Manager from VMware had been final released weeks back. Couple of interesting technology that I found out as it look similar to the German base Technology Virtuozzo.
As virtuozzo claim it as the Virtual Private Servers which share the same operating system, library files from the OS and template base technology which able to deploy a VM within or less than a minute. Obviously, Lab manager is not really the new technology in the market to provide this as I had experience with Virtuozzo since 2 years back on this. Of course, VMware did the best marketing job to reach the customer worldwide.

Lab manager provide version control and multiple sets of Server with Fence technology (NAT) and IP mapping to prevent hostname and ip conflict if you require to connect to the production network for your development and test environment.

IP mapping is some cool stuff example you may have 2 different VM with same IP as 10.1.1.2 in the Lab manager, but both of different version of sets of VM which link from the original image, there will not conflict to each others while you enable the connection to the production network, that was due to the Fence, whick the connected to a seperate virtual NAT network, and it map to a different production IP to reach the production network. In order to do this, is highly recommend to reserve a pool of IP for lab manager to be auto assign when needed.

Virtuozzo could be categories as a different approach in VM technology as some of the guys call it as VPS, virtual private servers. It share the same OS base, library file and etc. Central Server management able to be done on the management server, and it provide flexibility to manage the VPS online most of the time. Virtuozzo is more towards the template base technology as you need to have the template ready when you need to deploy the specify middle ware or applications.

Lab Manager is suitable for large scale development and operation support environment. Vendor base will be easily helpful on the technology been built on top of lab manager. Cost of the licensing skim seems to be the show stopper for SME or medium enterprise which may not focus on IT business. The current licensing skim will require to be built on top of the ESX enterprise edition with additional CPU sockets for Lab Manager. Again, its cool technology providing is suitable with cost and effective.