Virtualised environments can shorten development cycles by providing an ideal environment for testing, says Warren Olivier, SA territory manager at Veeam.
In addition to optimising resources and saving energy, virtualisation has important consequences for agility, he says. "Developing and testing new code for the business is a huge part of an IT department's work," says Olivier. "But the more complex your environment, the more difficult accurate testing becomes."
Isolated testing environments are difficult and expensive to establish and maintain, says Olivier. "I can't stress enough how hard it is to get everything right," he emphasises. "You can clone your production environment, but you still need a different set of IP addresses, which means a possibility of conflicts later on. Even if you avoid that problem, there is always the chance that one small change to your production environment while you're testing a single download or registry edit can sink the whole ship.
"We've heard many client stories of changes that passed with flying colours in the test environment - but then everything fell over when they put it into the production environment," he adds. "It's a rare CIO who doesn't have bitter first-hand experience of this."
A virtualised backup system can ease much of the risk and expense of the testing process, says Olivier. Quickly and easily created virtualised backups can restore in seconds if anything goes wrong - and "once you have that backup system in place, it makes sense to use it for testing as well", he adds.
A virtualised test environment can be created with just a few clicks, explains Olivier. "You can create a backup, test it to ensure it's an exact copy of your production environment, then boot it up in isolation to test your patches or new rollouts. Your original backup is unaffected, and you don't even need massive additional storage because we can run the machine in a compressed state."
Both the risk and timeframe of development can be reduced using virtualisation, enabling greater creativity and agility, he concludes. "It can make your entire organisation more agile and more creative. You get to develop and implement new code much more quickly, and because the risks are low, you can try creative solutions. You don't spend all your time, resources and budget trying to get the test environment as close as possible to your production environment."
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