Archive for the ‘Testing’ Category
March 28, 2008
Michael Warrilow at Hydrasight makes a strong case for why management tools need to support heterogeneous hypervisors. His strongest argument, in my mind, is the affinity of specific jobs to specific hypervisors. An example is Oracle’s database support only on Oracle’s version of Xen. In the realm of virtual lab management and the application lifecycle, the affinity of specific jobs to hypervisors couples with the natural heterogeneity of the production data center environment to make support for such heterogeneity a key requirement for replicating production application configurations in a virtual lab. We also believe that the ubiquity of Visual Studio as a development environment in the enterprise will result in broad deployment of Windows Server 2008 in development – which will give Hyper-V a strong initial foothold and will create new opportunities for using virtualization in unit, integration and functional testing.
What do you think?
Link: The inevitability of heterogeneous hypervisor management
Posted in Microsoft, Surgient, Testing, Virtualization, virtual lab | Leave a Comment »
January 22, 2008
Article from SearchServerVirtualization.com regarding VMware’s recently announced Stage Manager product. The product claims to cover the application lifecycle to help promote applications into and from production. My question is how is this different from Lab Manager?
Confusing to Lab Manager customers? For most enterprise applications, the environment employed outside of production is the test environment. Why would a customer use both VMware Lab Manager and VMware Stage Manager? Stage Manager seems the stronger of the two, and certainly closer to what we do at Surgient with our lab management platform and VQMS. Is this the death of VMware Lab Manager? How will VMware deal with confused customers, especially Lab Manager customers?
VMware only? Then there is the question of a tool that is meant to support enterprise apps but only supports VMware virtualization. Most enterprise data centers are heterogeneous environments, and the majority of applications are not yet deployed in virtualized containers. The shortcomings of Stage Manager seem to be its presupposition that the world be 100% virtualized in the short-term. Most customers we speak to are nowhere near that as a decision or a reality.
What do you think?
New VMware Stage Manager tackles application lifecycle management
Posted in Testing, lab management, software testing, test management, virtual lab, vmware | 3 Comments »
January 9, 2008
Laurianne McLaughlin at CIO has published the results of a survey of 300 CIOs on their use of virtualization. Lots of good data and analysis in the article (link below). Most interesting to me is the responses to the question of why people invested in virtualization:
Reasons to Virtualize Servers
| Cut costs via server consolidation |
81% |
| Improve disaster recovery and backup plans |
63% |
| Provision computing resources to end users more quickly |
55% |
| Offer more flexibility to the business |
53% |
| Provide competitive advantage |
13% |
From the standpoint of virtual lab management, the fact that 55% of the respondents are trying to accelerate their ability to provision computing resources to end-users is a great sign. It maps to what customers are telling us – they are seeing tremendous returns from automating the provisioning of virtual machines for support, training, testing, proof of concept, evaluations etc. Those conversations suggest that a virtual lab environment is becoming a platform supporting a host of non-production activities that traditionally have been slow, expensive, and considered tactical distractions for the IT ops group. Putting an automated utility in place allows the operations team to spend their time on things that are strategic to the business, instead of being interrupt-driven with deployment and configuration requests.
Your Virtualized State in 2008 – CIO.com
Posted in ROI, Testing, Training, Virtualization, lab management, virtual lab | Leave a Comment »
November 16, 2007
Surgient and Utopia Solutions will jointly present a webinar on accelerating software delivery with test automation and test lab management.
What: “Power Up Your Application Testing – Accelerate Software Delivery with Test Automation and Test Lab Management”
When: Wednesday, November 28 2007, 11a PT (2p ET)
Speakers: Lee Barnes, founder and CTO, Utopia Solutions and Erik Josowitz, VP Product Strategy, Surgient
Register: https://surgientevents.webex.com/surgientevents/onstage/g.php?t=a&d=666451502
Posted in Mercury, Testing, lab management, outsourcing, quality, quality management, test management, virtual lab | Leave a Comment »
October 9, 2007
At Surgient Success (success.surgient.com) we’ve launched a contest. The 5 most active participants in the discussion forums as of November 16th will win Apple iPhones! So if you are interested in virtual lab management and want to talk more about it, and also have wanted an iPhone…. For more information and rules/conditions etc take a look at http://success.surgient.com
Posted in Testing, Virtualization, contest, iPhone, lab management, test management, virtual lab | Leave a Comment »
July 3, 2007
Nice article in current SDTimes discussing a recent survey by voke, inc. (see previous blog posts by Theresa Lanowitz) that demonstrates that virtual labs used in the context of software testing (think regression tests, configuration tests, user acceptance tests, etc) can reduce test cycle time by up to 50%.
SD Times – Automating the Virtual Testing Lab for Fun and Profit
Posted in ASQ, Mercury, Testing, Virtualization, lab management, quality, quality management, software quality, software testing, test management, virtual lab | Leave a Comment »
June 22, 2007
Posted in ASQ, HP, Mercury, Testing, Virtualization, quality, quality management, software testing, test management, virtual lab | Leave a Comment »
June 16, 2007
Nice article by John Waters describing how virtualization, and lab management techniques, is changing the way that applications are developed and managed in an enterprise environment.
Redmond Developer News | BookSmart Review
Posted in ASQ, Testing, Virtualization, lab management, quality management, software quality, software testing, virtual lab, vmware | Leave a Comment »
ZD’s Dan Kusnetzky posts a response to the latest InfoWorld 2008 awards, noting a number of companies is missing. Surgient VQMS was a 2007 winner of the award and Dan notes that virtual lab companies such as VMlogix were skipped this year.
