Skytap Virtual Lab Manager

Skytap offers a complete virtual lab manager solution as a cloud-based service over the Web. Because it’s a service, it enables organizations to gain immediate value from a fully-featured virtual lab management application and access on-demand virtual infrastructure for application development and test, IT ops testing, virtual learning or sales demo labs. It can be used as an extension of existing on-site infrastructure or replace it entirely.

How Skytap Works

The Skytap service can be accessed from any location using only a Web browser. Skytap Virtual Lab includes three major components:

• Virtualized infrastructure, including hardware, storage and networking resources;
• A virtual lab management application;
• The Skytap Library.

Skytap’s pool of hosted virtualized infrastructure allows organizations to scale up and down lab resources as they need them. Virtual machine configurations can be deployed into a virtual lab with just the click of a button and easily shared to enable distributed team members to collaborate in the same virtual environment.

Using Skytap, organizations can run their applications and virtual machines unchanged in the cloud on industry-leading VMware infrastructure. Skytap supports all operating systems that run on these hypervisors, including Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Linux variants.

Skytap includes a complete virtual lab manager application that enables IT users to configure environments, upload software assets, set up and tear down lab environments, and manage projects. Users that only require access to certain virtual machines, such as sales professionals and students, access Skytap through a simplified Web-based console.

The Skytap Library includes pre-built virtual machine images of major operating systems, databases, applications and test tools. This eliminates the need for IT personnel to install baseline images of commonly used software when creating test, training and demo environments, saving hours of manual set-up time. In addition, customers' existing virtual machine images, ISOs and builds can be easily uploaded into a private area of the Skytap Library.