Demystifying Virtual Lab Management

The benefits of a virtualized lab environment for development and test teams are compelling and quantifiable-rapid provisioning and tear down of environments, faster test cycles, and powerful new capabilities to resolve defects. Although some application development teams have experimented with virtual machines and have seen some of the benefits, they've also discovered issues with virtual machine "sprawl," difficulties administering the lab, and lack of virtual private networking. Ian Knox provides solutions to these problems and offers ways to simplify both managing and using virtualization in your development and test environments. Ian describes the basics of virtual lab automation and how you can use virtual labs to solve some of the most pressing and expensive challenges in software quality. He guides you through the important implementation choices for building a virtual lab and, using real-life case studies, explores the common pitfalls. Take back an understanding of a virtual lab's capabilities and limitations and learn how to automate your lab with specific tools and build integration techniques.