VMWare on the Same Page

We are excited to welcome VMWare to the conversation. Earlier this week, VMWare announced the introduction of a Beta product – VMWare Stage Manager – to “accelerate the delivery of applications from staging into production.” This announcement resulted in many interesting comments, ranging from entirely positive to those with questions about where the product fits into the VMWare suite of offerings. Among the more interesting comments, were:

• Yellow Bricks reports that Stage Manager will go way beyond Lab Manager
• Surgient’s Virtual Lab Management Blog wonders how this new product will compete with VMWare Lab Manager
• Gerben’s Blog on Virtualization provides some screen shots and a comparison to Lab Manager
• Tarry Singh wants to test it out

At StackSafe, we are happy to see that VMWare has decided to acknowledge the problems that IT Operations teams face with regard to pre-production environments. In past blogs, we have discussed the results of our research about the lack of methods and solutions to help IT Operations perform effective change and release management. This issue is particularly apparent with regard to staging, testing, and analyzing of the impact of change to production infrastructures.

Whether their environment is virtualized or physical, change and release management is a particular problem for IT Operations teams. They must manage complex production systems with significant inter-dependencies; they are under mandate to deliver nearly 100% production system uptime; the user community expects IT to dynamically make changes to production immediately and continually… and all the while IT must prevent downtime and impact to production performance. These problems are compounded by the inability (due to resources, time, budget, etc.) to establish and maintain a representative staging environment.

Our research points to specific reasons why organizations have not achieved testing maturity. Specifically, 30% of companies lack an infrastructure specifically designed for testing and staging. The ability to stage representative pre-production infrastructures is one key factor in performing effective change and release management. Otherwise, how can an IT Operations team approve changes for production without the full certainty and confidence that they’re producing realistic test results?

As a ‘second generation virtualization’ vendor, StackSafe incorporates base virtualization as the enabling technology for staging, testing, and detailed analysis of changes made to pre-production infrastructures. While our focus is less on solely virtualized environments, we are happy to see VMware validate the importance of establishing representative staging platforms for release management. We certainly agree.

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Filed Under: Testing, Virtualization