• Management and Automation
  • Orchestration and Automation
  • Provisioning
  • Laboratory Management
  • Release Management

Laboratory Management

Management of virtual machines for software developers in a laboratory or development environment

Provides the development and QA teams with a flexible method of creating isolated and configured environment. Each environment can consist of several servers and user workstations. A repository is provided into which the environments can be stored. Environments can be checked in and out just like any configured item, however the configured item in this case is a full environment. Each environment is fully isolated from other environments by the use of fenced networking.

Parallel clones of a configured environment can quickly be provisioned enabling parallel testing of a particular release, avoiding the serialising of testing activities, which otherwise would create contention within a single environment.

Features of Laboratory Management solutions

• Self-service provisioning portal, which enables on-demand provisioning of complete multi-tier environments in just minutes
• Image library management capabilities, specifically the ability to manage multi-tier environments as a single unit
• Bug sharing features that promotes the capturing and sharing of system configurations between members of the team

Environments can be frozen and saved with particular error states, saved and accessed at later date to re-test particular use case scenarios. These environments can be transferred to the development team at any location, where they can easily examine the states of the programs and data, which are causing particular error conditions.

Benefits of Laboratory Management solutions

• Eliminates delays, accelerates project completion; easy to use
• Pristine copies of target environments every time
• Improves software quality; facilitates troubleshooting; accelerates time to market
• Eliminates time-consuming manual tasks; frees up time for value-add work
• Reduces server sprawl and VM sprawl in labs
• Lowers storage consumption; minimizes fire-drills
• Enables the rapid adoption of virtualisation without having to re-train users in vCenter