VMware has announced the pending availability of VMware Lab Manager 3, which is supposed to provide greater automation and control for IT lab environments.

Software developers and QA engineers use VMware Lab to provision multi-VM environments and it’s also meant to give IT departments more control over policies. The new release supports multiple organizational units – like helpdesk operations, training organizations and sales teams – advanced networking capabilities, and tighter integration with VMware Infrastructure.

VMware says many organizations want to establish global lab operations to recreate customer environments, provide hands-on labs or drive sales demos.

Lab Manager 3 supports multiple organizations of lab users with a single installation, whether users are local or distributed globally. IT administrators can set up customized user roles and access rights to dedicated or shared resource pools imported from VMware VirtualCenter to provide users with service.

Lab Manager also integrates with Microsoft Active Directory so both user management and resource administration can be centralized to simplify lab administration and reduce overall resource consumption.

Tighter integration of VMware Lab Manager 3 with VMware Infrastructure 3 should let lab administrators take advantage of VMware HA, which provides high availability for VMs, and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), which continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among the virtual machines based on pre-defined rules. As a result, system configurations in the lab are said to be more resilient to hardware failures and users are protected from unplanned downtime.

Lab Manager lists for $1,295 per processor and the new cut should be out by now.