Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Ah, show-stopper for me for most of my potential customers; as far as I can tell from the demo video the product is geared more towards a VM-only environment. Maybe I misunderstood the announcements but I had thought I would be able to clone physical production servers (P2V and V2P) into stage manager for doing staging/testing “stuff” before releasing back to production.

Looks like it’s geared more towards end-end lifecycle management for VM’s where dev/test VM’s are managed through to production.

Development->Test->Stage->Production and then around the prod->Stage loop for patches, updates etc.

Obviously nothing stopping you from P2V or V2P’ing VM’s at any stage in this lifecycle using other tools (VMConvertor, Platespin) etc. but it won’t be managed as part of the lifecycle by Stage Manager.

Yeah I know “physical is dead“… but we’ve not managed to convince the whole world virtualisation will fix everything – 3rd party vendor support for important production systems is still a grey area under virtualisation; vendors seem to be coming round as it gets market traction but the instant “we don’t support that under VMWare” get out of jail free card for vendor support teams is still a problem.

Ah well, gap for a 3rd party to add value – would be nice if Platespin were able to write a plug-in as P2V and V2P seem to be where their products win, or even MS with their multi hypervisor VM Management stuff.