Alex Handy
recently wrote about virtualization in testing for the San Diego Times. (see Virtualization bridges, from development to IT). He
notes that virtualization is a hot IT topic and begins with the
comment that, “many
of virtualization's proponents see the technology as a way to bridge the gap
between operations and development. The path to that bridge, they say, is often
through the test lab.” He later notes that on the application side, developers are
motivated by speed and flexibility. These concepts are often completely lost on
the operations side, where the focus in on cost and control. Virtualization
addresses both needs.
In addition to saving time and money, Alex notes that it can provide continuity to a support team as it can look at a given user's exact deployment of a given application or a given group's exact configuration. This can really accelerate the support and remediation process.
One challenge arises when virtual test beds attempt to enter distributed application environments, such as Cloud Computing and SOA. When an
application is tied into a network of services offered throughout an
organization's extended network of partners, how can they be added into a test environment?
You can't just take a hard drive or a server and replicate it, when many of the elements in the environment aren't available for that activity, or they are far too complex to realize cost-efficient hardware virtualization models.
Here Alex quotes iTKO's John Michelsen, who said that this issue can be troublesome for large development projects inside and outside of the cloud. "In the real world, there's an airline that has 1,500-plus regression tests that run on a nightly build," said John. "They spent three or four hours each day dealing with about 10% of those tests failing every night. The vast majority of the failures were false failures." The lack of availability to the needed services, and relevant data for testing, made the test lab a major bottleneck during the software lifecycle.
Service Virtualization, using a Virtual Service Environment to capture and simulate the behavior and data of interconnected systems, addresses this issue through bypassing the constraints of operating in the real world with production systems. Here is an example of how an airline addressed this issue with virtualization.
Comments