I'm in the evaluation stages of a solution to help my department easily test the software and fixes we develop. I would really like to use VMware to help us as we test on pretty much every platform out there. While VMware can't do HPUX it can do the three major OSs we deal with(Windows, Linux, Solaris). Currently we just have a bunch of different servers set up, I think I count 5 or 6 physical machines just for the three major OSs, and they are all messy with lots of other work having been done and never cleaned up. I would like to consolidate this down to one file server. My idea is to create a bunch of VMs and have the developers pull these images onto their laptops to do all the testing in that environment. So far VMware can do pretty much exactly what I want it to do. The only problem is that when fully configured the images turn out to be about 10GBs, which would take a long time to move around, even on our wired network speeds. So right now my major blocking point is the large size of the VM.
Ultimately I envision the developer creating the fix on their host system, in our case that's Windows. Then when it is time to test they pull down the VM, compile on that platform, and test on that platform. When they are all done they just delete the image or revert back to a previous snapshot to clean the environment for future use. We would also set up an automated process to kick off our automated testing on each platform.
I have some big plans for this solution, but as I said earlier the size issue is a damper on the proceedings. Any suggestions to help me out?
Thanks ahead of time!
