I am not going to pretend I am the devops expert here but I was playing around with vFabric Application Director last week and I thought it was really cool solution. I can really see the value for development teams, but also for large support services teams and even education org’s. Being able to create deployment / configuration plans for application stacks by simply dragging and dropping is something I would have loved to have when I supported various development and support teams in a previous life.
I could have saved a lot of time… during physical machine and virtual machine provisioning, installation of software (automated if I was lucky), configuration and figuring out how it all worked with this weird database flavor or new Operating System. With App Director, yes you will need to figure all of it out once, you can easily repeat the same steps over and over again. You can select different Guest OS’s, different databases, different apps etc.
If you are in the same boat as I once was I would suggest watching this video and giving App Director a test run just to figure out if it can simplify your life!