The Challenge: IT organizations are under immense pressure to reduce testing costs and shorten the cycle from development to deployment. The number of test scenarios and use cases has exploded due to all the permutations of hardware, app servers, firewalls, browsers, and databases that need to be supported.
Development organizations need to work closely with their quality assurance and production/operation counterparts to orchestrate these complex development, test, staging, and production environments. The issues that must be overcome include:
- Scarce hardware resources to support all the test configurations.
- Development and test environments that cannot match the expensive and massive multi-tiered, multi-server production environments, making it riskier to deploy new applications.
- Configuration idiosyncrasies between development, test and production.
- Off-shore or distributed development/test teams that require their own test environments.
- Managing patches consistently across all environments.
Our Solution: Using Virtual Iron, IT organizations can create and manage virtual infrastructure for development and testing environments, enabling them to:
- Partition a single physical server into dozens of isolated development environments, reducing hardware requirements and capital expenditures while improving operational efficiency.
- Coordinate configurations and footprints between the development, test, staging and production environments using “golden images” (software reference stacks), eliminating repetitive configurations and improving time to market.
- Clone and copy exact production environments into virtual servers for troubleshooting and testing.
- Roll back to previous known environments using captured images (snapshots).
- Automate QA server updates with new engineering drops via snapshots and simulate complex networked applications on a single server.
- Remove hardware restrictions by allowing teams to use physical hardware that does not need to be identical across development, QA and production. For example, a virtual server can be moved from a 2-way server to a 4-way server.
