VMworld Europe 2008: Day One: Breakout Session: Introduction to Stage Manager
Lights, camera, action! OK, usual joke about Stage Manager to one side. This is not a SIMS game where you role the game is manage a team of stage hands, lighting crew, actors and so on. This session was much more useful than LCM. However, if like me you not one of these guys who’s been in the same IT department for the last 10+ years it’s hard to build a usage case for Stage Manager. Don’t get me wrong. I get the idea and get the usefulness of the product. But if you not some Marcuse ”Organisation Man” or Corporate Man. This is way beyond what most people need to automate the process for leaving Lab Manager behind, and getting that new VM with a new service into Prod. For me it’s just not a space I operate in – I guess that’s more my problem than Stage Managers. Putting this aside you can see with the fact that the product uses the same technology as Lab Manager (linked clones; network fencing) That there will be a lot of perceived overlap between Stage Manager and Lab Manger. I feel VMware will need to more aggressively and more clearly – put the case forward for why those big enterprise guys will need another automation/management layer on top of VirtualCenter. People are going to say at what point does Lab Manager-Stage Manger-Lifecycle Manager – hand the process from one manager to another. You can see where I’m going here. The Register has it done quite humorously with the joke – that the next major release from VMware will be a Manager Manager to manage all your management tools – or an orchestrator to orchestrate your orchestration.
July 17th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
[...] The release Lab Manager 4.0 which is the first high-level management product to be compatiable with vSphere4. That’s a good sign as many people (wrongly in my opinon) were belly aching that no every single high-level management product was compatiable with the new platform. New to Lab Manager 4.0 is cross-network fencing. A network feature that’s been long discussed since VMworld TSX in Canne in 2007. Basically, its like a PVLAN impleament – in that you can have VMs with the same IP/same name on the same network without conflicting with each other. I’m really interested in this feature – because it might be away forward for DR solutions where re-IPing VMs and making sure there not unintend network conflicts during the test of recovery plans… It also seems that a prediction many people (including myself) made about 2 years ago has come true. That “Stage Manager” and “Lab Manager” have jumped into bed, got each other pregnant and had a shot-gun wedding. Yep, they’ve come together as one product. It was always quite tenious argument separating the two, and even harden VMware Vets like me stuggled to understand why there was a Lab Manager AND a Stage Manager. [...]