[boundlessdreamz]

I think you will get more bang for the buck by using something like ansible or salt (I have only used ansible and love it and I have heard salt is comparable)

You don't have a standard repeatable way to set up an environment now. You need to do that first before jumping on docker I think. Once you have that, you can start replacing parts of the setup with docker and see if it fits your needs.

The advantage of ansible is that it is idempotent and the changes it makes to the system are the same ones you make manually or via bash scripts. So it is quite easy to debug

[kosma]

Seconded. The most important feat you need to accomplish is being able to spin up new instances/environments on a whim. Once you have that, provisioning, testing, failover, scaling and high availability get much easier. Vagrant is decent in this role; the only caveat is that the majority of developers tend to never reset their environment and let the cruft accumulate. It's more of a people problem than a tech challenge, though: if your company culture is "if it works, don't touch it", then you have way bigger problems than choosing the right virtualization solution.

[Nyetan]

Aah, brilliant -- and they even have a book :D thanks for the recommendation!

[xorcist]

The big pro with Ansible and similar tools is that the scripts are actually very readable, with clear best practices.

If you come to a new place and "there's an error in here somewhere", the difference between layers of images held together with shell scripts and a Ansible/Puppet/Chef script is like night and day.