A lot of the folks at VCE (including me!) were really pleased to see this post. I've been thinking about Vblock Systems since 2010 as a way to do the dev / test / qa / qc / prod / scale /etc... pattern in the _same_ investment for initial spend and ongoing operations.

There are thousands of Vblock enabled teams out there in the world now so this is a great data point for those that have not yet considered the non prod options on the same environment.