Taking Control Using Virtual Test Lab Automation

Due to more complex software and environments, the expectations placed on software labs have grown significantly. While under tighter budget constraints, test labs are expected to rapidly provide the infrastructure to create varied test environments for executing test cases. Traditionally, only physical machines and bare-bones hypervisors formed the lab infrastructure. Testers spent a significant amount of time creating and re-creating pristine test environments. Ravi Gururaj explains how virtual lab automation (VLA) leverages server virtualization and redesigns the lab to make it relevant to a broad set of stakeholders, including development, test, support, pre-sales, and training. Learn how you can create multi-machine configurations, execute test cases, and capture entire machine states quickly for later defect analysis. Because it is easy to create and share configurations, testers can rapidly expand the test environment and realize reductions in cycle time for functional, combinatorial, and regression testing.