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Skytap testing 'virtual lab' service

By David Worthington

May 23, 2008 — A startup has taken virtualization up “into the cloud” in hopes of creating a virtual lab management infrastructure that will appeal to QA test teams.

Skytap Inc. now has limited availability of its Skytap Virtual Lab service. Virtual Lab provides preconfigured virtual machines for various Linux, Solaris and Windows environments that are accessible via Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Services will be priced like a utility—on a metered basis—by CPU usage and storage consumed. However, some predictability is built into its pricing: There will be a base subscription and the option to purchase additional CPU hours at a set rate, said Steve Brodie, chief product and marketing officer at Skytap.

Skytap, which uses VMware and Citrix on the back end, keeps system images up-to-date by applying the latest hotfixes and updates as needed. The service can serve up any operating system that is supported by VMware, and customers may supply their own images, said Brodie. Customer images, however, are not monitored for patching by Skytap.

Testing organizations are often short on resources and time at the end of the release cycle, said Brodie. He claimed that Virtual Lab’s value proposition is that it provides a large number of configuration options and that client will not need to set up and maintain their own test beds.

In what might be a boon to agile developers, Virtual Lab may also be used to augment an existing testing lab in a hybrid environment, he added.

At the present time, there are over 50 virtual machines included in the Virtual Lab library; the company’s goal is to have over 100 available by the end of the year, said Brodie. These differ from each other in a number of ways; browser versions may differ, or virtual hardware might be differently configured.

Skytap is largely serving a Windows clientele and provides hosted instances of SharePoint and SQL Server as well as basic OS setups.

The Virtual Lab service may be generally available later this year, said Brodie, with the caveat that so-called ‘cloud services’ often remain in beta for longer than wished.

Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, testing & troubleshooting, virtualization

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