"We were getting a lot of requests from developers to spin up these machines in ESX Server," says Stewart Hubbard, director of IT engineering at clothing retailer Cold- water Creek. The developers didn't like to wait, but giving them access to the production interface, VMware's VirtualCenter, wasn't feasible. So Hubbard is rolling out Slingshot, a self-service provisioning tool from Akimbi in San Mateo, Calif., that lets developers provision and deprovision their own virtual machines.

Akimbi is one of several vendors offering such tools. Others include Surgient Inc., Enigmatec Corp. and Platform Computing.

Developers at Coldwater Creek choose from a library of virtual machine images. Predefined amounts of virtual machine resources are allocated to individuals or groups. Hubbard says the developers can provision the resources they need when they need them and then release them when they're done. "There aren't [idle] resources running all of the time," he says. In addition, Slingshot can provision virtual environments for multitiered applications and group together virtual servers into a single, integrated environment.

The arrangement is a win-win setup for IT and the end users. Administrators retain control over resource use, while developers get the resources they need without going through red tape. "We want to segment the developers from production but still give them the ability to work as quickly as they need to," Hubbard says.