Hyper-V, it doesn't give software testers time to go get a brew while things roll back
September 18, 2017
Hyper-V, it doesn't give software testers time to go get a brew while things roll back
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hyper-V
We use Hyper-V for production servers and virtualising test environments across the organisation.
Testing
For testing it allows us to quickly roll back a machine to a 'clean' environment, enabling us to guarantee testing from a known point. This is something that is done very regularly in our business as we are a software development house and need that guarantee that the test environment is not spoiled by a previous build of our software, or an operating system update.
Servers
Almost all of our servers are now virtualised, this helps us manage our physical environment by reducing the hardware requirements. It also allows virtualised machines to be ported with ease if a problem arises on the host server.
Testing
For testing it allows us to quickly roll back a machine to a 'clean' environment, enabling us to guarantee testing from a known point. This is something that is done very regularly in our business as we are a software development house and need that guarantee that the test environment is not spoiled by a previous build of our software, or an operating system update.
Servers
Almost all of our servers are now virtualised, this helps us manage our physical environment by reducing the hardware requirements. It also allows virtualised machines to be ported with ease if a problem arises on the host server.
- Checkpoints - used on a daily basis many times, we would be lost without this functionality.
- Flexibility - Hyper-V manages its hardware demands seamlessly distributing memory across the guest machines without compromising the guests or the host.
- Ease of administration - Tied into the Windows OS (Server and 10 now) it is very easy to get a virtual environment running.
- Hyper-V Manager - our main Hyper-v server (for test VMs) has many virtual machines on it, and we find managing more than a handful of machines in the Hyper-V manager can become a little cumbersome.
- Before Hyper-V, I had a computer under my desk and a version of Norton Ghost. To test a new release of our software involved me re-imaging that machine. This took about half a day and was just ONE machine. Hyper-V I have many developers connected to our Hyper-V server rolling machines back on-demand, with almost instant results. The impact of this has been huge on the level of testing our products get.
- We don't need to have a room full of servers, this has not only made our server room look a lot tidier, but has reduced our power requirements by not having to run many different 'real' servers.
Hyper-V being 'free' was the main reason we went for it here. We gave VMware Workstation/Server a try when initially evaluating virtualisation options, but Hyper-V won out for ease of integration into our existing environment. VirtualBox was more of a 'plug in' solution which in our opinion didn't have a place in our systems - although some developers still use VirtualBox locally, most prefer to use Hyper-V.