Has anyone experience of using Lab Manager for multi-streamed development with different data recency requirements? That's a stumbling block we're trying to plan for in a planned implementation.

Let's say you have a VM version of production. As I understand it, Lab Manager will then allow developers to build their own fenced environments from that in which they can do independent dev/testing. The storage requirement is small as it only holds the deltas from the base VM image. If a developer encounters a problem in their fence then they can destroy their cloned environment and quickly bring up new ones from the base image. That means the dev teams are working independently and no-one is modifying the base image thereby avoiding polluting that with code which may not work or be deployed. So we can continue to make multiple copies of servers and tear them down when they are no longer required.

The problem comes when one dev team need recent production data on the base image. Perhaps a change has recently been deployed to production (or a new external data feed has started) and the new data is required in dev/test in order to develop new reports or data warehousing ETL work with "real-world" data. If we update the databases on the base image with production data then we will no longer be able to support the existing clones because the base for the delta has gone. So all dev environments have to disappear. Another dev team may be working on a long term project which involves the generation of lots of dev/test data so can't afford to keep losing their environments.

Has anyone experienced these kinds of challenges and come up with a way to overcome them?