2011-02-16

vCenter Lab Manager to be Retired - Told You So?

Jason Boche - The Future of VMware Lab Manager, Ian Koenig - Lab Manager is dead.. Long Live Lab Manager and Mike Laverick - VMware Lab Manager vs. VMware Cloud Director: Another Case of "Spanners" and "Hammers?" - the writing was on the wall.

For those of you who saw this - my apologies, but if not, VMware has posted an update on Lab Manager - announcing that there will be no more major releases for Lab Manager

We want to provide you with an important update about the vCenter Lab Manager product.  As customers continue to expand the use of virtualization both inside the datacenter and outside the firewall, we are focusing on delivering infrastructure solutions that can support these expanded scalability and security requirements.  As a result of this focus, we have decided to discontinue additional major releases of vCenter Lab Manager.  Lab Manager 4 will continue to be supported in line with our General Support Policy through May 1st, 2013.

As VMware continues to invest in our customers' journey to cloud computing, we are focusing on delivering secure multi-tenant enterprise hybrid clouds with VMware vCloud Director.  vCloud Director is a new software solution that provides the scalability and security necessary to deliver catalog-based self-service provisioning across different workload types, across multiple enterprise tenants, and across both private and public deployment models.

As a customer of Lab Manager, we would like to offer you a special opportunity to leverage the scale and security of vCloud Director.  Customers who are active on SnS may exchange their existing licenses of Lab Manager to licenses of vCloud Director at no additional cost.  This exchange program is entirely optional and may be exercised anytime during Lab Manager’s General Support period.  This provides you the freedom and flexibility to decide whether and when to implement a secure enterprise hybrid cloud.

The part in bold is something that I am interested in hearing an answer from VMware about. At present Lab Manager is licensed per CPU

per-vm Licensing

And as you may know vCloud is per VM.

vCloud Pricing

From my experience the conversion rates are not always in the customers favor. What will the conversion rate be?

SR has been submitted, looking forward to a reply.