VMware announced today the release of the Public Beta of their latest management/automation tool called “VMware Stage Manager.” The new product is intended to provide administrators a new platform to “stage” new application role outs before putting it live into production. Essentially, this addresses the burden of maintaing “test”, “development”, and “test” environments and trying to juggle them all while making sure they don’t drift too far out of sync.
As published by VMware, these are the selling benefits of the product:
- Manage pre-production infrastructure assets – servers, storage and networking equipment – utilizing them only when needed, thereby reducing server sprawl and increasing the resource utilization efficiency of IT services hosted on VMware Infrastructure
- Rapidly build up a pre-production image of complex production environments, even cloning directly from production systems to ensure that all environments are exact replicas, thereby mitigating risk of errors and potential downtime
- Systematically propagate complex system changes through all phases of the process while more easily enforcing change and release management procedures
- Accelerate the completion of requests for changes to production systems
The product builds on VI3 and utilizes the concept of Resource Pools to manage the priorities of the systems as they transition through their lifecycle.
I, for one, am excited to get this Beta loaded up and see if it fills in some of the holes that it claims to. In my opinion, VMware is heading the pack when it comes to identifying and providing quick solutions for challenges that are being faced as Virtualization hits mainstream in the datacenter.
Download it today from: http://www.vmware.com/beta/stage_manager/index.html
