VMware on Monday launched an upgrade of Lab Manager, a system that helps organizations deal with the software development life cycle related to distributed application architectures.

Lab Manager 3 offers better support for multiple user groups, more advanced networking capabilities, and tighter integration with VMware infrastructure, the vendor said.

The upgrade is particularly helpful to organizations that want to establish global lab operations encompassing not only software development and quality assurance teams, but also help desk operations, training organizations, and sales teams that use the lab to recreate customer environments or to drive sales demos.

So everyone can get their job done without infringing on other teams, the software allows IT administrators to set up customized user roles and access rights to dedicated or shared resource pools. Lab Manager also integrates with Microsoft Active Directory to centralized user management and resource administration to further simplify lab operations.

The new version also has built-in support for multiple physical and virtual networks, such as SOAs, firewalls, load-balancing networks, and clustered applications -- all of which have to be simulated and tested in the lab. The upgrade simplifies the design of these system configurations and helps lab users better understand the architectures and troubleshoot network problems.

Lab Manager 3 also has tighter integration with VMware Infrastructure 3, which provides technology for monitoring and managing resources across virtual machines, which makes it easier to keep the lab operations up during a hardware failure.

VMware Lab Manager is set to ship Aug. 7. The list price is $1,295 per processor. VMware acquired the technology for Lab Manager two years ago with the purchase of Akimbi Systems.