Production vs. Non-Production

A friend of mine had a discussion with his server guy this week about a virtual production server that is running on the development VMWare ESX server. While he told me that the server generally performs well on that box, there are procedural, logical, and policy reasons for running a production VM on a production ESX host. It has been in production for over 4 months and it's about time for this to be resolved.

In addition to this issue, the users in Arizona can't see the staging server to test/base approvals upon without being handed a convoluted internal address or IP Address. My friend's desire to simplify this approval testing by introducing a convenient name is hindered by technical issues, and he eventually resigns the fight.

The following is an IM conversation regarding the situations.

Developer: 2 Questions
Developer: When is the AppOne Production server moving?

Server Support: it will move.
Server Support: no rush..

Developer: Is the AppOneStage URL available from Arizona yet?

Server Support: i think, we spoke on this 2nd issue as well. We have work around which is host file.
Server Support: current setup is very weird.
Server Support: they have local work group joined computers.

Developer: Ok... I'd like to be able to have them use stage, easily. Anyone there.

Server Support: they have issues resolving dns names, only work around we have is to use host file, which is not best solution but at this time. nothing we could offter them right away which will solve the issue.
Server Support: regards to moving production AppOne off of Dev LUN, this will happen but as I understand, it's not causing any issues where it's running it from.
Server Support: bigger issue regards to that move is, it can not happen during the day time. last I spoke call center is open till 11pm and I can't keep my self awake till that time.
Server Support: only day we have is Sunday, I will try to juggle some time on Sunday to do this task

Developer: okay I'll stop asking for either of these... but will say that the Production AppOne box SHOULD be on a production server and that's where I'd like to see it as my preference.
Server Support: I totally Understand, but as user and person supporting it, doesn't' really care where it's running it from. Just pretend you never heard it was running on the DEV LUN.
Developer: How does Arizona get it's DNS?

Server Support: unless someone else is keep asking you for status and you are following it with me, then it's fine.
Server Support: but let's face it, there is no real diff.

Wow... There is a difference, in my books.