The significant gap between production and development environments for IT applications leads to a false sense of quality during development. Even with detailed tests planned out, quality of service in production is far from acceptable.

This paper proposes the concept of a Virtual Production Environment (VPE) which should be able to reproduce the production environment as well as provide controls for what if analysis. The paper also provides a review of state of the art technologies that are suitable for components of the VPE and the need to integrate these in to a holistic emulated environment.