VMLogix Gives Free Licenses to Higher Ed

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 12/03/09

VMLogix has launched a new program for higher education to introduce colleges and universities to its line of virtual management applications. The VMLogix Education Program provides free subscriptions and support of VMLogix LabManager and VMLogix LabManager-Cloud Edition, allowing institutions to create on-premise infrastructure and tap into the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

VMLogix LabManager, which works on multiple virtualization platforms, consolidates virtual lab infrastructures and lets end users such as students gain access to lab resources in a policy-controlled, automated, and self service manner.

VMLogix LabManager-Cloud Edition uses Amazon EC2 for virtual lab automation hosted on servers supported by Amazon to provide on-demand access to virtual lab tools and computing resources over the Web. The Cloud Edition follows a pay-for-what-you-use pricing model, which eliminates much of the upfront capital expenditure.

New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland both expect to participate in the program.

"VMLogix LabManager-Cloud Edition is an efficient and comprehensive way for us to provide a test bed for students in our computer science classes," said Gedaliah Wolosh, manager of computing resources at the New Jersey institution. "Additionally, if and when our population and needs grow, VMLogix will make it easy and cost efficient to scale-up our infrastructure in the Amazon EC2."

"With VMLogix LabManager, we will be able to easily manage and automate the deployment of test environments in generally varied and large groups while controlling user access and specific capabilities," said Antoine Hauck, system administrator at the Lucerne university. "These are huge benefits to our classes, students and IT administrators. Before, the method was manual distribution of VMware images to the students, which meant students had to have VMware Workstation software installed on their clients and that took a lot of our administration's time."

The new education program offers a license for the latest release of VMLogix LabManager or VMLogix LabManager-Cloud Edition at no cost for one year and free access to VMLogix product support for the first year, including e-mail, knowledge base, and user forum support channels, as well as e-mail support for up to three cases in a calendar month.

"IT departments at colleges and universities manage some of the most complex networks, and many have the need for virtual lab automation but may not have the financial resources to acquire a solution and illustrate to department and university heads how virtual lab tools like LabManager can enable IT operations to be more efficient and cost-effective," said Sameer Dholakia, CEO of VMLogix. "Because budgets are tighter than usual right now, we're offering this program to approved institutions as a way to jump-start their virtual lab automation initiatives both in on-premise infrastructure as well as the public cloud for free so that they can receive the benefits and be able to quantify the savings."

The company said instructors, researchers, students, IT, and other institutional representatives with a valid e-mail address (.edu or .org) can request a free license. A sales person from the company will respond with instructions for accessing the product, including a deployment guide, product documentation, and license key for the software.