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Lab Automation and Staging Solutions

Software development involves continuous testing, bug reproduction, and bug fixing. As a result, developers may spend about 30% of their time provisioning and tearing down test environments. When applications are ready for production deployment, IT personnel must manage application configurations in various stages from release to production, with similar opportunities to improve process efficiency and resource utilization.

With virtualization, test and development staff can provision configurations quickly from existing templates. Then they can test the configurations and take snapshots to capture bugs and improve resource utilization by consolidating virtual machines on fewer physical resources. During application deployment, virtualization makes it simpler for IT personnel to provision, clone, patch, and test configurations before deploying to production and to archive production systems for compliance and protection of business data.

Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V improves utilization by virtualizing test configurations on fewer physical resources. Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager provides a self-service portal that enables authorized users to provision simple configurations. It also allows administrators to clone virtual machines for test purposes. Systems Center Data Protection Manager allows reliable and rapid backup and recovery of production configurations. Building on the proven capabilities of Hyper-V, Microsoft partners also provide solutions with comprehensive capabilities such as multi-machine configuration and network fencing to test multi-tier applications.

In summary, Microsoft’s application development and deployment solutions provide these key benefits:

• Improve resource utilization
• Increase application quality while reducing application development time
• Increase service levels while reducing application deployment time