Surgient, the pioneer of capturing snapshots of production systems and presenting them to software developers as the environment in which to test drive their latest creations, is bringing out release 5.4 of Surgient Lab Management Platform.

Virtualization leader VMware has its similar Lab Manager, launched in November 2006, and another startup, VMLogix, has offered its LabManager since July 2007. But Surgient was first in the field, having been founded in 2003 to pursue creating infrastructure snapshots as the ideal test lab for new software. By testing prospective applications in their future production environments, developers learn more about their dependencies and performance in what will be their real-world setting.

Release 5.4 of Lab Management Platform helps relieve IT operations staff from generating replicas of production software by taking snapshots of production server configurations. Those virtual machine images are managed off a central server and fed to testers and developers as needed in the software development process, Surgient CEO Tim Lucas said in a prepared statement on the release.

Release 5.4 supports VMware's latest version of its hypervisor, ESX Server 3.5. Surgient has also announced support for Microsoft's Hyper-V when it becomes available as part of Windows Server 2008 in August. It has plans to support Citrix XenServer -- the commercial hypervisor based on open source Xen -- but has not announced a date when it will be available. Surgient intends to supply a virtualized software lab with heterogeneous hypervisor support, said Lucas.

In addition, release 5.4 includes a Web services API. Software testers can use SOAP messaging to communicate between Lab Management Platform and application life-cycle management tools, such as change control systems.

Release 5.4 also includes an updated add-in for HP Quality Center, a test management tool to allow exchanges between the platform and the Quality Center.

Release 5.4 adds support for VMware's VMFS, its file format for virtual machine shared storage based on distributed storage area networks.

Store virtual machine images may be moved from one location to another with 5.4's enhanced library management feature.

Lab Management Platform 5.4 is priced at $15,000 and is now available.