Vates Technology Preview Program (TPP)
What is a Technology Preview?
Technology Preview Programs provide selected Vates customers with early access to upcoming product innovations, enabling them to evaluate new functionality in real-world conditions and provide feedback that directly shapes the final product. A Technology Preview is an exploratory, collaborative experiment: participants are not end-users of a finished product, but active co-contributors to the engineering direction of the Vates Virtualization Management Stack (XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra).
Technology Preview features are not fully supported under standard Vates support agreements, may not be functionally complete, and are not intended for production use. They should be deployed only on non-critical workloads or in isolated environments.
Current Tech Previews
- TwinStor: hyperconverged storage for two XCP-ng hosts.
Scope and support
Participation in the Technology Preview Program is subject to selection by Vates at its sole discretion. Submission of a request to participate does not guarantee acceptance, and Vates reserves the right to accept or decline any applicant without providing justification.
Each participating customer is assigned a Technical Account Manager (TAM), who acts as the single coordination point for all TPP activities: deployment, issue tracking, feature requests, updates, and escalation to the developer team. Standard support channels will redirect any Technology Preview ticket to the appropriate TAM and developer team with no guaranteed SLAs.
Because Technology Preview features are still under active development, all maintenance operations, including software updates, configuration changes, and troubleshooting, must be approved and coordinated with the TAM and Vates Professional & Support Services teams. This is not a self-service deployment: close collaboration between the customer and Vates is what makes the program valuable for both parties.
Vates will be fully transparent about the current state of each Technology Preview implementation, its known boundaries, and the uncertainty around the final product direction. Customers must review and acknowledge the risk documentation prepared by the engineering team before entering the program.
Stability, upgrades, and path to General Availability
Vates cannot guarantee the stability of Technology Preview features. As a result, customers may not be able to seamlessly upgrade a Technology Preview deployment to subsequent releases of that feature or of the underlying platform. While Vates intends to bring Technology Preview features to General Availability (GA) in future releases, the program may reveal that a feature does not meet the standards required for enterprise viability, or that a different design direction is needed. In such cases, Vates cannot guarantee that the feature will be released in a supported manner, and no ETA is committed for the production version.
Customers exploring Technology Preview content must accept that there may be no migration path from the Technology Preview to the GA release. A full reinstallation of the GA version may be required, and customer data may need to be migrated or may be lost.
Issues and feature requests reported during a Technology Preview are tracked through the TAM, with direct backing from the developer team, and are considered for resolution in future iterations of the feature as Vates works toward General Availability.
Customer obligations
By participating in the Tech Preview, the Customer agrees to:
- Provide configuration data. Share relevant environment and configuration information, including but not limited to server, storage, and network details, as reasonably required for the evaluation.
- Participate in evaluation activities. Complete any questionnaires or forms provided by Vates, and make appropriate personnel reasonably available for scheduled meetings with our Professional Services (PS) team.
- Report issues and requests. Promptly report any defects, incidents, anomalies, or feature requests identified during the Tech Preview.
Customer entitlements
During the Tech Preview, the Customer will receive:
- Direct technical assistance. Direct access to our Professional Services and Engineering teams to assist with the deployment and onboarding of the feature under evaluation.
- Prioritized feedback consideration. Feedback submitted during the Tech Preview will be given elevated consideration in our product planning process, subject to technical feasibility and our sole discretion.