A pattern we are increasingly seeing in our customers employ is on-demand testing environments using virtualization. These can take many forms and be accessible just to automation or face development and testing teams.

One of the simplest approaches is one we use in-house. AnthillPro needs to be tested against a number of platforms and back-end databases. Rather than buy a huge amount of hardware to service all these combinations, we have virtual test environments. Our nightly automated test runs fire up a virtual environment, run the core test suite, tear down the environment and begin again with the next environment. In the morning, we can check the test reports and see if anything failed.

A customer I spoke to recently was solving a broader problem. Development teams frequently wanted new test environments for one application or another. Constructing an environment - ordering the machines, installing operating systems, application servers and tools - took weeks. They've used virtualization, and automation to drop that time to less than 30 minutes. When a development lead requests a new environment through a request form, she picks from a list of environment templates. A request is passed to an HP Operations Orchestration server which pushes a VMWare ESX server to clone the appropriate configuration and bring them up.

AnthillPro agents on the template are tweaked for uniqueness, and connect to the central server. API calls into AnthillPro have it add the new agents to a new environment and add it to the projects used by the development team that made the request. Less than 30 minutes later, the development lead is notified that the environment has been created and push button deployments are available to it from AnthillPro.

We're talking with a couple customers who are looking at ways of automatically responding to growing queues in AnthillPro by spinning up additional servers of the type that are in demand, while suspending those that are not. With widespread virtualization and growing public and private clouds, the sky is the limit.