Microsoft – Gold Certified Partner
- The Challenge
- The Solution
- Solution Testing in the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center (with Demos)
- Benefits of Virtual Infrastructure Automation
- System Requirements
Microsoft and Surgient have partnered to provide Global 2000 enterprise IT organizations with a comprehensive solution for optimizing virtual lab infrastructure and automating the virtual machine lifecycle to drive IT Service Delivery. The combination of Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization engine with the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform enables IT test and QA professional to:
- Efficiently manage virtual lab infrastructure and provide true self-service resources to employees, customers, and partners around the world, while reducing capital and operating costs and increasing user productivity
- Easily manage the complete virtual machine lifecycle (request - reservation - provisioning - operation - storage - decommissioning) and prevent VM sprawl with policy-driven automation and an integrated approval system
- Streamline stage management of IT Service configurations, easily transition IT Services between stages, and automate production cloning to speed IT Service delivery to production
The Challenge
IT operations and QA/Test organizations in Global 2000 enterprises face a myriad of challenges in the mission to develop, test, and deliver timely, high-performance, easy-to-access IT services. Of these, four challenges have surfaced in recent years as critical barriers to service delivery:
- The setup and tear-down of complex, multiple-machine application configurations is difficult and typically leads to long provisioning times.
- Efficient IT Service Delivery is hampered by manual, semi-automated, and infrastructure-centric resource management processes and tools that do not provide a rich self-service experience for users.
- Management of the virtual machine life cycle must be addressed in a highly transient, rapidly changing development and test environment, with smooth, easy transitions between stages.
- IT operations and QA/Test organizations must manage silos of under-utilized hardware resources that drive higher capital and operational costs.
One of the largest bottlenecks in enterprise IT service delivery is the time and cost of setting up critical software test environments. The time spent provisioning test configurations can easily consume 50 percent or more of the total test cycle. Additionally, IT professionals face significant challenges in efficiently modeling and managing multi-tier applications for development and test efforts, managing administration-intensive resource request processes and tracking service configurations through user-acceptance testing and production stages.
Developing and testing changes to complex software applications presents a significant challenge in that most organizations do not have identical copies of the production environment available due to cost or complexity. While virtualization has made it more cost-efficient to utilize test hardware, the task of replicating the production environment necessitates additional capabilities provided only by a robust virtual infrastructure automation and management platform.
The Solution
Microsoft® Virtualization and the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform™ provide Global 2000 enterprise IT organizations with a comprehensive solution for optimizing virtual lab infrastructure and automating the virtual machine life cycle to drive accelerated, high-quality testing and delivery of IT services.
Because the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform integrates tightly with Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ technology, IT professionals can manage virtualized infrastructure, automate resource administration, and provide an easy-to-use self-service interface for resource users. With lab, life cycle, and stage management, the Surgient Platform with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is a comprehensive solution for optimizing virtualized infrastructure.
The combination of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform enables IT Test and QA professionals to:
- Easily convert existing physical servers into virtualized Hyper-V hosts.
- Quickly provision complex multiple-machine configurations using shared machine templates.
- Share physical resources across multiple-machine configurations without causing network conflicts, leading to enhanced consolidation.
- Efficiently manage virtual lab infrastructure and provide self-service resources to global employees, customers, and partners while reducing capital and operating costs and increasing user productivity.
- Easily manage the complete virtual machine life cycle (request, reservation, provisioning, operation, archiving, and decommissioning) and prevent virtual machine sprawl with policy-driven automation and an integrated approval system.
- Streamline state transitions of IT service configurations and automate production cloning to speed testing and delivery to production.
Benefits of Virtual Infrastructure Automation with Microsoft and Surgient
- Centralize Test Infrastructure and Control Usage
Employ centrally administered resource management policies to enable self-service capabilities without losing control over infrastructure. - Reduce Capital Expenses
Dramatically cut the hardware purchases necessary to support testing, and better utilize existing hardware through re-use and by increasing the number of people who can leverage it. - Reduce Operating Expenses
Automate the set up and configuration of test labs, substantially reduce wait times, and free up QA staff to focus on more high-value activities. - Improve Productivity
Empower QA teams to do more with less, and increase collaboration between QA and development teams.
System Requirements
Hardware
Minimum of (2) x86 servers; minimum 2GB RAM and 40GB free disk space each
Surgient Software
Surgient Virtual Automation Platform 6.0 or later
Virtualization Software
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V
Supported Guest Operating Systems
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x86/x64
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x86/x64
Microsoft Windows Server 2000
Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 x86/x64
Microsoft Windows Vista x86/x64
Microsoft Windows XP Pro x86/x64
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