Building a Fully-Virtualized Test Lab

For many organizations, creating a testing environment to replicate every combination of hardware and software that their users have is cost prohibitive. If your organization faces this challenge, the solution may be to create an infrastructure that is based upon virtual machines. Virtualization allows a single physical server to run the workloads of many different servers. Virtual test environments save time and money and support sophisticated test cases that are not possible in a traditional physical environment. For multi-tiered systems, an interconnected set of servers (application server, Web server, database server, domain controller, and firewall) can be implemented within a family of virtual machines running on a single system. Ian Robinson describes how to transition your test systems from a physical to virtual infrastructure, resulting in a far smaller and more cost-effective number of systems, increased manageability, and the ability to test across a broader range of platforms.

• Learn how to create virtual machine "libraries" of common platforms
• Discover how to reproduce defects in a virtualized environment
• Use only one system to support multi-tier testing configurations