Bobcares

Release Management of Infrastructure/Service

by | Aug 20, 2010

To roll out an IT service or business application into production, companies customize standard application packages, or go ahead and develop the entire application inhouse. In either case, applications go through a rigorous release management cycle, before it is put in to production. This is pretty much similar to the process applied to production systems, that need to be patched or updated.

In today’s challenging times, companies need to respond very quickly to software requirements, and roll out new services or feature requests to meet these requirements. The process is mostly simplified or rather eased by creating an image template of instances at each stage of application development. This makes the process seamless and also helps greatly in managing versions. Simultaneous testing and deployment of projects can be done by adopting such a methodology.

Even though this method is widely adopted, where test instances are created to implement integrations and patch management, it adds to the complexity of overall integration. Often the results won’t be the same in a production environment, unlike the testing or staging environment. The whole process of migrating the applications to production in itself is time consuming, and it often leaves you with the additional burden of further testing the app in the production environment.

In the highly competitive market, the time to hit the market and time to deploy services are very important. Companies cannot afford to spend months in production cycles or days in deployment stages.

VMware Infrastructure and vCenter Stage Manager

VMware Infrastructure can provide a definitive edge to automate release management in the datacenter and reduce the issues of configuration drift and release management. It allows creation of standardized software containers, wherein components can be standardized across different stages of release management. The ease of management that VMware Infra provides, can easily make infrastructure management pretty easy.

VMware vCenter Stage Manager, organizes systems in the enterprise software lifecycle into services. These services represent the deliverables of IT and are broken into stages that span development and testing to production. vCenter Stage Manager increases IT service availability, accelerates response to configuration changes, promotes compliance with regulatory or workflow processes, and promotes efficient use of storage

Together with VMware Infrastructure, vCenter Stage Manager automates release management and allows IT operations and application owners, to roll out applications into production and meet change requests to production systems more dynamically, in response to business requirements. vCenter Stage Manager provides a global view of all applications and IT services under management and simplifies service operations through an intuitive user interface.

To know more about Stage Manager, visit http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/stagemanager_pubs.html


About the Author :

Sankar works as a Senior Software Engineer in Bobcares. He joined Bobcares back in April 2006. He loves grooming/mentoring people. During his free time, he listens to music, and enjoys singing..


1 Comment

  1. sweetball

    Thank You

    The given information is very effective
    i will keep updated with the same

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