Surgient, an early supplier of virtualization for software development and test labs, is expanding its offering to include self-provisioning virtual machine users with the Hyper-V virtual server of their choice. Testing requires servers set up to match the many different environments in which a prospective application will run. Surgient wants to make reserving IT resources for testing purposes, a resource-hungry function, as easy as reserving an airline flight through an online reservation system.

Surgient has included a self-provisioning capability in its expanded Virtual Automation Platform. Once the tester indicates what he wants, the Surgient application reserves the capacity to run those virtual machines in the data center in an appointed time period. When the test is done, the resources become available to someone else.

Virtual Automation Platform has been engineered to work with Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Hyper-V hypervisor. Users of the system can be presented with a set of standardized virtual servers to choose from, or assemble a virtual server from parts by indicating how much memory or how many virtual CPUs they're seeking. In the past, constructing test environments hasn't always been a smooth process. Testers describe what they want to IT managers, who may or may not configure the right set of machines for them. Sometimes, servers have to be purchased and set up to complete the process, a drain on a project's time.

And the problems don't necessarily end once the testing is under way. "Under normal circumstances, it's hard for IT to get the tester to give back those resources because they were so hard to get in the first place," Nicole McGarry, senior manager of product marketing, said at the Microsoft TechEd Conference in Los Angeles on Monday.

With an automated, self-provisioning system, testers will be more willing to yield data center resources when they're finished because they know they can reserve them again when needed.

The self-provisioning capability works as well for IT managers as for software developers and testers, McGarry added.

"The setup and teardown of complex, multitier test environments traditionally takes days and even weeks," said Microsoft's Dai Vu, director of virtualization solutions. The combination of Virtual Machine Manager and Surgient's Automation Platform lets end users do the job, "often in just minutes," he said.

The Surgient self-provisioning capability has itself been tested in Microsoft's Enterprise Engineering Center in Redmond, Wash., against a four-tier SAP application based on the NetWeaver architecture, McGarry said. The platform deploys, tracks, and decommissions virtual resources as planned by the reservation system, she said. It's available immediately.

Surgient customers include Merck, Raymond James, Hewlett-Packard, EMC, CA, Iron Mountain, IBM, GE, Intuit, Microsoft, and SAP.

Learn more about all the latest products and technologies at TechWeb's Interop Las Vegas, May 17-21. Join us (registration required).