I have an idea to streamline deployments of prototypes within our team using VMs. The idea would be that a developer would be able to deploy their artifacts to Maven, then use a Web interface to pull them onto a development VM for integration/regression testing. They would then be able to to push those artifacts to a reference system, and finally onto production.
I'm currently thinking of doing this myself using the vSphere Java API ( http://vijava.sourceforge.net/ ), and some simple scripting to grab artifacts from the Maven repository, configuration from SVN, and then start up a JBoss server. It feels like the kind of thing that may already be available though, has anyone heard of something similar?
Isn't it the thing that Continuous Integration is made for? We have done similar stuffs by using JetBrains TeamCity and Jira Bamboo.