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APPLICATION TESTING EXCLUSIVE
Impressive performance, good reporting, and strong features offset VQMS's complexity
TEST-LAB AUTOMATION software that leverages virtualization to ease fundamental IT operations has started to emerge.
Just two products currently compete in this market space: Surgient VQMS (Virtual QA/Test Management System) and Akimbi Slingshot. I reviewed Akimbi Slingshot software earlier this year and found it to be a good solution (infoworld.com/4132). In the intervening period, VMware bought Akimbi and is enhancing Slingshot, which it plans to integrate with its VMware Lab Manager, currently in beta.
VQMS is a powerful, high-end solution that will please IT managers. At its core, it mirrors the capabilities of Akimbi Slingshot, setting up, deploying, copying, and tearing down complex multiserver configurations of virtual machines. Surgient then adds several enterprise-friendly features, such as an advanced scheduling system and a reporting module that's mostly oriented toward tracking resource utilization. The trade-off to these benefits is that running VQMS is a complex and, at times, frustrating experience.
Surgient's core business is hosting virtualized apps, especially for training and demos. This hosted model has deeply influenced the design of VQMS.
VQMS has two principal modules. The main console, called VCS (Virtualization Control Server), sits on one server and uses software agents to monitor VMs running on other systems, called hosts. These hosts - which can run VMware ESX Server, GSX Server, or Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 - are generally aggregated into pools. Support for Xen is under consideration.
Separate library servers store images of VMs that can...