"R. David Murray" wrote I wasn't aware of that Wiki, or of zctl.py until after I wrote something of my own along these lines: a 'zopectl' script that has a slightly different design objective than zctl.py. zctl.py seems to be oriented primarily toward managing ZEO instances. zopectl is oriented toward managing multiple INSTANCE_HOME setups running on the same box (eg: production and test instances, migration instances, or indeed multiple zope-instance-per-virthost virthosts).
You'll find it at http://www.zope.org/Members/rdmurray/zopectl.
I'll have to have a look at it - I've built my own tool to manage multiple ZEO instances across multiple hosts, as well as allowing upgrades from development -> internal test -> external test -> production along with starting up temporary servers and frobbing loadbalancers to make sure upgrades are transparent to the end users. This is probably a tad overkill for most people, though. Anthony