Virtualization bridges, from development to IT
March 15, 2009 —
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For all their similar geeky tendencies, software developers and systems administrators don't have a lot in common. Developers worry about timelines and agility. Systems administrators worry about cost and control. But for both sides of that IT fence, virtualization technology is a hot issue, whether it's in the test lab, on the developer desktop or on the server. 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.
It's in the test lab that the most powerful and thrifty benefits of virtualization can be quickly realized, said Roger Klorese, senior director of product marketing at Citrix.
“When you look at the fundamental economics of what it takes to have 10 developers working on five different systems at once, the cost of spinning up 50 servers to do that are prohibitive to a lot of development environments,” said Klorese. He added that virtualization gives developers “the ability to spin up multi-tier applications and multi-node networks.”
Indeed, virtualized test environments save time and money, not to mention the many forms and hours spent requisitioning equipment from IT operations.
Another hidden benefit is from the continuity virtualization can bring to a support team. “A support organization can look at a given user's exact deployment of a given application or a given group's exact configuration,” said Klorese. "That really accelerates the support and remediation process.”
Derek Slayton, senior director of product management at Citrix, said that the move to virtualization in a test environment could warrant a major new job duty for someone on the team: virtual machine wrangler. “In a lot of cases, there's some upfront work that goes into it, but it certainly has a quick payback period in terms of efficiency," he said. "It has also given more self-service capabilities to those environments without having to involve operations.”
The new development team obligation can be met with some old tactics, however, such as regression testing. New lab management tools from Citrix, Microsoft and rPath, for example will soon be available to assist with wrangling the virtual machines used in nightly tests. These management tools all include repository-like functionality for managing and storing the different iterations of virtual machines required for proper regression testing.
Related Search Term(s): testing, virtualization
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