Citrix automated lab management in Essentials for XenServer allows administrators to create and manage a common library of workload configurations and to rapidly provision them with a single mouse click. Self-service access to approved configurations enables multiple groups to deliver consistent virtual environments improving the efficiency and accuracy of moving application workloads through development, testing and into production while achieving significant savings in time, and hardware and storage costs. By automating and simplifying virtual lab environments, organizations achieve:

• Shorter testing and development cycles –  Reduce time to market and IT response times by centralizing access to prebuilt production-like environments and utilizing advanced automation capabilities for self-service setup and tear-down of approved virtual environments.
  
• Better quality – Improve stability and consistency by automating manual and error-prone build and test processes, maximizing test coverage and reducing time to detect and reproduce errors.
  
• Lower costs – Dramatically consolidate software and hardware resources, reducing sprawl and improving utilization across disparate teams.
  
• Increased productivity – Maximize collaboration and productivity of distributed development, test and support teams by making production-like environments visible and shareable across the enterprise.
  

The Web-based lab management console provides role-based access to a rich set of tools that greatly advance the agility and efficiency of managing labs and enable collaboration across your non-production environment. Users can select from a self-service library of templates to quickly create server and workstation configurations for pre-deployment acceptance testing, product development and quality assurance, technical support triage or standardized training and demonstration environments.

Additional configuration tasks such as installing applications, running scripts or defining the startup order and dependencies are pre-configured and automated. When provisioning, the package is deployed at the touch of a button.

Once tasks have been completed, the resources can be manually or automatically reclaimed releasing valuable resources back to the pool. Snapshots of the system can be saved and shared for deeper problem investigation or utilized as golden configurations for deployment to production environments.

Lab management automates manual configuration tasks and enables cross-team collaboration and self service allowing IT organizations to optimize application development and testing and reduce the operational and resource costs of managing lab environments.