The new tool, called Stage Manager, looks to give IT
administrators an additional tool for testing applications and
utilizing resources.
VMware is looking to give IT administrators a new tool to help with
the testing and deployment of new applications in the data center. On Jan. 21, the
Palo Alto
,
Calif.
, company announced the public beta of Stage Manager, a tool
that looks to help streamline the process of bringing a new application
through various test phases before full deployment within an
enterprise. While VMware is releasing the beta, the full version will
not be available until later this year, said Melinda Wilken, senior
director for marketing with VMware.
Stage Manager works in concert with VMware's Virtual Infrastructure
suite and allows IT departments to have better control over what Wilken
calls "shadow instances," or the replicas of a production environment
that are created at various stages of testing a new application for
eventual use in an enterprise. Click
here to read about how VMware hopes to strengthen its desktop
virtualization portfolio with the acquisition of Thinstall.
Wilken told eWEEK that these shadow instances tend to stay within a
system after an application has already been tested. This can cause
sprawl within a system and also draw other computing resources away
from other production configurations or interfere with updates and
changes to the application. Stage Manager allows managers to
better control all of the preproduction assets, from servers to storage
to network equipment, and allows for better utilization of those assets
during production, which cuts down on server sprawl once testing is
complete. The software also enables the IT department to build
preproduction images faster and allows for cloning from older
production systems.
"What we wanted was to streamline the production process and allow
the IT department a way to move easily from one stage of production to
another," Wilken said. The Stage Manager beta complements VMware's
Lab Manager, which allows its users to set aside data center resources
for application development and testing. The company updated Lab
Manager in July to support 64-bit operating systems.
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