Looking for input: Segregating hosts to specific VM servers

[Stephen John Smoogen]

Currently we have our staging environment and our production
environment on the same servers. This works well for the most part
because the loads generated by staging rarely affect production.
However there are times where it would be nice to be able to test
certain 'issues' together. As in updating the core xen/kvm server and
a staging environment without affecting anything in production. My
idea would be to look at either repurposing or budgeting for a staging
xen server (lets call it sxen01 for convention) that would be used for
various staging servers that could test for updates to say EL5.5->
EL5.6 on all the systems at once or to work on tuning variables
without affecting production servers.

This is an initial idea so I am looking for feedback.

Thanks.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
“The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.""
— Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines