Background
My company uses an EMC product called Documentum. It is content management server software. A Documentum installation consists of (minimally) the content server software, database, and the content. There are other supporting pieces of software but for the purposes of this question this is all that needs to be consider.
Consider that there is a Virtual Machine for each of the three:
1 VM Content Server
1 VM Database
SAN managed storage mounted to Content Server VM as /filestore_01
A complete lifecycle would move through each of the three of these groupings 1 for each of development, staging and production.
So we would have:
Development:
1 VM Content Server
1 VM Database
SAN managed storage mounted to Content Server VM as /filestore_01 (~2TB)
Staging:
1 VM Content Server
1 VM Database
SAN managed storage mounted to Content Server VM as /filestore_01 (~200GB)
Production:
1 VM Content Server
1 VM Database
SAN managed storage mounted to Content Server VM as /filestore_01 (~200GB)
Currently when an upgrade the upgrade steps are repeated for each in turn (devlopment, then staging, then production). This is also true for application releases. Instead, and in keeping with the benefits of virtualization, we'd like to managethe VMs as a lifecyle and promote our development server to staging (and create a new development from an image), and our staging to production, repeating this lifecycle as necessary.
Problem
In a Documentum Content server install the database and content are very tightly coupled, meaning that we need to keep the content and database tied to the installation for which they were created. If we promote staging to production we would be replacing our production database and content with staging data and content. How can both promote our virtual machines through a lifecycle while also ensuring that the production server always contains the production content and metadata?
Our VMware is managed by another group in the data center and they maintain a strict hands-off approach. We have no access to the VMware vCenter system but if we had a strong argument for how it could be done we may be able to make it happen. Please forgive my ignorance of VMware, it is not my forte.