vCenter Lifecycle Manager

OK, so this topic has already been covered in the Varrow Blogs, mostly on Calfo's Blog. I want to bring it up again, however, because I keep seeing environments that stand to benefit greatly by putting this or a similar technology into place in their ESX environment.

There's no argument that VMware makes things easier for your IT Department but could it be argued that it makes things a little too easy? Now that you can have a new windows or linux guest up, running, and configured in minutes rather than hours everyone wants part of the action, right???

Of course they do and why would you blame them? Most administrators try manage provisioning tasks manually and quickly get overwhelmed. Ed, the exchange admin, had you create him a test server last month. Is Ed done testing now? Can you shutdown Ed's VM and free up some much needed resources? We can ask Ed, but oh yeah.. that's right, Ed's on vacation for a couple of weeks. Will we forget to ask him when he gets back?

You get the picture. It can get really nasty trying to keep up with everyone and every project that requires use of your ESX infrastructure. For this reason and after some recommendations from coworkers I started looking into VMware's vCenter Lifecycle Manager. It appears that it will give IT the ability to automate much of the lifecycle process and hooks right into vCenter 2.x. I'm hoping to evaluate it in depth soon but you can check it out on VMware's page here:

https://www.vmware.com/products/lcm/

And check out Calfo's demo video he posted at the beginning of the year.

http://calfo.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/vmware-lifecycle-manager-demo-video/