Blackbaud Labs announces the immediate FREE open source release of our powerful, internally developed, Virtualization Lab technology tool set (VMLab). Full source code is provided "as is" with no specific support from Blackbaud under the Mozilla Public License 1.1.

VMLab has dramatically improved our efficiency, and we feel it could truly benefit a much broader audience. Therefore, we have posted full source code and documentation with the hope that your organizations can benefit from this technology as well. There are no restrictions. We encourage ISV's, non profits, enthusiasts, and anybody else who is interested to download the code and try it out. Better yet, improve the code and let us know!

"I'm always game for FREE stuff Blackbaud, So what is VMLab?"

From the readme: The VMLab project exists to provide an easy to use tool for managing a virtual lab. The primary design goals were ease of use, low maintenance, and scalability.

Blackbaud's QA, support, hosting and development teams rely on virtualization technology heavily. In particular, we employ VMWare's virtualization products to maximize our efficiency around platform testing.

As any QA pro or developer will tell you, testing software on multiple platforms and working around the many nuances inherent in each can be quite a time sink. With all the versions of Windows, service pack levels, memory and disk combinations, the permutations are staggering. Given that, we needed an approach that would let us maximize the computing resources we have in our platform test lab and offer us the best testing coverage possible. Enter VMWare Server, the stunning virtualization product from VMWare, Inc. With VMWare we are able to create "Virtual Machines" which we can run right from our desktop that are configured exactly to the user's specified configuration.

The cool part is we didn't stop there. Antonio and Thomas, some super-enterprising engineers on our team have taken it all to the next level with VMLab. VMLab is an internal (well not anymore) tool that allows a user to hit an internal, web page that launches a smart client application which ultimately provides a simple UI prompting for what OS is required, Blackbaud products that should be installed etc... Upon filling out that information, VMLab actually sends that request to a bank of machines running VMWare Server and the virtual machine is created in minutes. The user can choose to download the new VM to their local, or run it from shared computing resources in the computer lab.

If you are struggling with platform testing issues, need a better solution for test to production migration scenarios, want to safely play with beta technology or simply are curious about virtualization, we encourage you to check out VMLab. We hope it helps somebody out there as much as it has helped us. Enjoy!