Is VMWare lab manager accessible?
The subject says it all. I'd like to use VMWare lab manager instead of VMWare workstation for some of my virtual machines to make sharing them easier, as well as having the backups automated by our corporate IT department. Is lab manager accessible with Jaws or any other screen reading software?
Hello: Short answer, yes it is accessible, but not the most usable. We have a four-member ESX host cluster devoted solely to Lab Manager, and I’ve been working with it for over a year now. Lab Manager is built around a web interface, and for the most part you use it just like web pages normally. There are a few controls I’ve not gotten to work well with any screen reader, Lab Manager has its own form of combo box and there are some hover menus. Still, with some good mouse work it is doable. One accessibility thing to keep in mind is the console views of VMs don’t have sound, so the only way to access a VM is via RDP. You’d need sighted help to get the OS installs and such going. Here are some things to consider from a nonaccessibility standpoint, just from someone whose worked with it for a long time. Lab Manager is very quirky. Even if your VMWare administrators are very competent at managing ESX, you through Lab Manager into the mix and they’ll have to relearn a lot and rework some habits. For example, once Lab Manager is introduced into a cluster, it wants you to manage the majority of the cluster using its interface, not the VIC. If someone changes something, such as networking, using the VIC and Lab Manager doesn’t detect it it can get quite upset. We’ve found the best way to handle things is to have a totally separate cluster with its own VCenter server that’s dedicated to Lab Manager. This isn’t required for support from VMWare its just what we’ve found works best. Because Lab Manager makes a lot of changes to the environment, you won’t be able to back up any of the VMs it creates. Lab Manager VMs are NOT ordinary ESX VMs. Lab Manager depends heavily on linked clones to do its magic, which makes proper backups and restores very difficult. We don’t back up our lab cluster at all accept for the machine running the Lab Manager server itself. We’ve also had several instances where Lab Manager breaks for no reason. Usually the Lab Manager and VCenter databases are out of sync, and if this happens you’re in for a world of hurt, at one point a year ago or so we ended up rebuilding the whole thing from scratch, AKA reinstalling ESX, reinstalling VCenter, etc. Now this isn’t to say Lab Manager is a bad product. Its not. It does some really cool stuff, and as we have hundreds of software developers working in it, its been a huge benefit for them. Its cut down on testing times because they have templates of installs they can easily pull and work with. So for us, the quirks and administrative overhead are worth the cost, but you’ll need to evaluate and judge for your own environment. Ryan ________________________________________ From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Jared Stofflett [stofflet@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 12:09 PM To: blind-sysadmins Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Is VMWare lab manager accessible? The subject says it all. I'd like to use VMWare lab manager instead of VMWare workstation for some of my virtual machines to make sharing them easier, as well as having the backups automated by our corporate IT department. Is lab manager accessible with Jaws or any other screen reading software? _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins
Hello: Short answer, yes it is accessible, but not the most usable. We have a four-member ESX host cluster devoted solely to Lab Manager, and I’ve been working with it for over a year now. Lab Manager is built around a web interface, and for the most part you use it just like web pages normally. There are a few controls I’ve not gotten to work well with any screen reader, Lab Manager has its own form of combo box and there are some hover menus. Still, with some good mouse work it is doable. One accessibility thing to keep in mind is the console views of VMs don’t have sound, so the only way to access a VM is via RDP. You’d need sighted help to get the OS installs and such going. Here are some things to consider from a nonaccessibility standpoint, just from someone whose worked with it for a long time. Lab Manager is very quirky. Even if your VMWare administrators are very competent at managing ESX, you through Lab Manager into the mix and they’ll have to relearn a lot and rework some habits. For example, once Lab Manager is introduced into a cluster, it wants you to manage the majority of the cluster using its interface, not the VIC. If someone changes something, such as networking, using the VIC and Lab Manager doesn’t detect it it can get quite upset. We’ve found the best way to handle things is to have a totally separate cluster with its own VCenter server that’s dedicated to Lab Manager. This isn’t required for support from VMWare its just what we’ve found works best. Because Lab Manager makes a lot of changes to the environment, you won’t be able to back up any of the VMs it creates. Lab Manager VMs are NOT ordinary ESX VMs. Lab Manager depends heavily on linked clones to do its magic, which makes proper backups and restores very difficult. We don’t back up our lab cluster at all accept for the machine running the Lab Manager server itself. We’ve also had several instances where Lab Manager breaks for no reason. Usually the Lab Manager and VCenter databases are out of sync, and if this happens you’re in for a world of hurt, at one point a year ago or so we ended up rebuilding the whole thing from scratch, AKA reinstalling ESX, reinstalling VCenter, etc. Now this isn’t to say Lab Manager is a bad product. Its not. It does some really cool stuff, and as we have hundreds of software developers working in it, its been a huge benefit for them. Its cut down on testing times because they have templates of installs they can easily pull and work with. So for us, the quirks and administrative overhead are worth the cost, but you’ll need to evaluate and judge for your own environment. Ryan ________________________________________ From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Jared Stofflett [stofflet@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 12:09 PM To: blind-sysadmins Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Is VMWare lab manager accessible? The subject says it all. I'd like to use VMWare lab manager instead of VMWare workstation for some of my virtual machines to make sharing them easier, as well as having the backups automated by our corporate IT department. Is lab manager accessible with Jaws or any other screen reading software? _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins
participants (2)
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Jared Stofflett -
Ryan Shugart