The one constant in test and development environments is change. IT staff continually need to build and take down machines in order to test new applications, operating systems and hardware, and ensure compatibility between new and existing parts of their infrastructure. Procuring and provisioning the equipment needed to perform testing can be time-consuming, resulting in unwanted lag times that slow your ability to move technology into production.

Virtualization Enables Easy, Rapid Changes

Virtualization can make life much easier for test and development staff. They can model the OS, application, security, and management environment prior to putting these into production in a more streamlined and efficient way, providing greater flexibility and quickly identifying potential conflicts. Virtualization provides the mechanism to rapidly model different environments and experiment with different scenarios, without significant expansion of hardware and physical resources.

For example, before deploying an application in production, IT professionals can create a virtualized instance of the image to ensure interoperability. This also builds familiarity with the tools and management issues of virtual machines.

But virtualization is not without its complications. Test and development staff still need to request VMs and applications from IT administrators in order to start the process. Not only can this cause time delays, it takes precious time away from the administrators.

Microsoft Solutions Improve Virtualization

With Microsoft virtualization products, test and development personnel can get the tools they need instantly. Windows Virtual Server provides the foundation to build a virtualized environment in the development lab. And with System Center Virtual Machine Manager's self-service capabilities, staff can quickly provision VMs themselves within preset controls from a simple web page, saving hours or even days in getting VMs up and running. Administrators can delegate provisioning to authorized users while maintaining precise control over the management of VMs.

SoftGrid Application Virtualization can also help ease testing and development processes. By enabling IT administrators to rapidly assign applications via Active Directory, it lets development personnel access required applications on-demand. In addition, because SoftGrid minimizes application-to-application conflicts and the need for regression testing, it reduces the amount of work needed to get an application through testing and into production.