VMware is offering beta software that expands the role of
virtualization in the data center. The introduction of Stage
Manager allows IT administrators to build a production-like
environment and test drive software changes in it before launching
them into production.
"We're explicitly targeting IT teams responsible for
pre-production staging of new software," said Melinda Wilken,
senior marketing director.
The pre-production phase of staging software is when a new
application or an application working with a patched operating
system is examined and tested before release into a production
environment. Any change to the existing software infrastructure in
effect becomes a subject for review and test before re-introduction
into production. Problems that aren't caught in the staging phase
may lead to business downtime later, and Stage Manager is intended
to avoid that, Wilken said in an interview.
It's not expected to be available as a product until sometime
this summer, she said. No pricing has been set. It's been available
for download and experimental use since Jan. 21.
VMware already offers Lab Manager, a system for testing new
software under various configurations before it goes into
production. But Lab Manager is tied more to the software
development, testing, and quality assurance process than the data
center's change management process. Stage Manager is oriented
toward the latter, Wilken said.
Software staging, which covers the pre-testing of patches,
updates, additions, or new modules to existing software or
introduction of new applications -- is a new role for
virtualization, but one for which it may prove well suited. In the
past, the expense of generating a duplicate production environment
on matching hardware was a task with a high price tag, one around
which inevitable shortcuts were taken. Nevertheless, downtime in
the data center is overwhelmingly associated with software changes,
rather than failed hardware devices.
"IT staff end up doing the staging activity in a real production
environment, and that's risky," said Wilken.
Stage Manager is designed to produce and retain various
configurations of the production environment and let IT managers
know how well these "shadow instances" match up to the real
production environment. The test environments inevitably "drift out
of synch" with the production environment, said Wilken.
In addition to staging new applications or other software,
staging can also allow IT managers to test drive new services that
rely on several pieces of software, an increasingly important task
as more companies adopt services oriented architecture.