The Next Step for Virtualization - Pre-production Testing

The following is a recap of the presentation that I delivered at itSMF Fusion 08 last week.

Thanks again to everyone who attended, and for the great questions that followed.

Unless you’ve been out of the industry for the past five years or so, you’ll know that virtualization is at the peak of its hype cycle.  We have successful commercial vendors, a growing competition in the hypervisor space, and almost every IT shop at least talking about their plans for virtualization.  But virtualization is far from just hype.  Lots of companies are using this technology to solve a variety of interesting problems.

Consolidation is one of two functions that have driven the present-day virtualization adoption rate, with the other being application development and testing.  IT data centers are still adopting virtualization to consolidate physical server space.  However, today’s consolidation is termed “green computing“.  The conversion of physical machines to virtual machines that are hosted on a single physical machine reduces not only data center floor space, but also the heating and cooling costs for fewer physical machines.  So the corporation saves money, and the environment benefits, too.  Companies also drove virtualization adoption by provisioning virtual labs that support code development, and that host applications for unit and functional testing.

This brings us to the innovation that is expanding today’s virtualization market.  Some examples:

• More and more companies find value in being able to “snapshot” a physical production system for the purpose of creating a virtual secondary, or backup, system.  Virtual snapshots are easy enough to capture, less expensive to build than a physical secondary system, and representative of what’s running in production at the time of the snapshot.
• Companies are beginning to build virtual SOAs in which key components of the service architecture, such as the message bus, WSDL servers, and custom services are hosted on a single virtual host.  Multiple applications needing to utilize one or more services can inter-operate with virtual services on a single host rather than with machines spread across the data center.
• Data center automation both facilitates and utilizes virtualization.  For example, automated virtual machine provisioning quickly creates the right configuration in a fraction of the time to provision physical servers.  Automated management of resource demands adds and removes resources as needed while controlling virtual sprawl, and automatically tracking virtual performance helps IT plan for the right system capacity.

Finally there’s the promise of using virtualization to improve pre-production testing.  By “pre-production testing” I refer to the system testing stage for new applications, new services, customized code, patches, OS configuration changes, system restores, modernization, data base changes… in other words, any change to the software infrastructure that IT needs to test before it is released for production system deployment.  Virtualization doesn’t solve every system testing requirement.  However, new technology and ideas are helping companies move virtual sandbox testing beyond the application QA stage. Some examples:

• Companies are deploying a hybrid mix of virtual and physical production machines.  A virtualized platform makes it possible to import the full software disk image from virtual machine workloads and physical server images to conduct realistic system tests against the hybrid environment.
• Not every component can or should be virtualized.  Today, system testers can initiate network conversations between virtual machines on the virtual network and external physical components.  This extends system testing scenarios over virtual and physical testing and staging labs.
• If you’ve invested in third-party testing tools and/or custom test scripts, virtualization leverages these investments to ensure that you don’t lose system testing capability.

I also presented a review of testing maturity factors and statistics from our research, and discussed the ways that virtualized system testing helps companies achieve more mature testing results.  Again please refer to the presentation slides for details.  It would be great to hear from IT personnel who are using virtualization to test more than just application code.

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Filed Under: IT Operations, StackSafe Corporate, Testing, Virtualization