Virtualisation and test environments

From ZDNet

At the enterprise level your average IT director will be looking for ways to automate resource management of hardware while high level system changes that will impact services are carried out. Crucially, they will want to do this right through the integration, testing, staging and user acceptance testing phases before committing the systems into production.

IBM, Intel, Zeus Technology and host of other names come to mind if I think about whom I might have last spoken to on virtualisation. But I’ll go the obvious route and mention VMWare as its Stage Manager product is in precisely this space. You’ve heard of the application management lifecycle right? Well this is the service transition lifecycle.

VMWare’s take on the subject is as follows: As new services or changes to existing services are being introduced (such as rolling out an upgrade to Exchange 2008 or making changes to a complex SAP installation) they often follow a sequence of stages such as integration, test, staging and user acceptance checking to ensure they are successfully tested, approved and configured for risk-managed deployment into production. IT typically maintains numerous dedicated “shadow instances” of the production environment to support the activities of each of these stages. These systems are prone to “drift” out of synch with the production configuration, jeopardizing the successful execution of system changes and updates and increasing the risk of production downtime.