Companies have realized huge gains by using virtualization to consolidate resources, and many are now looking for other ways to leverage the technology.

If you listen to suppliers VMware and Surgient, a logical next step is to push lab environments into the virtual realm. To address lab needs, VMware bought Akimbi Systems last June for its tools to automate management of multimachine software configurations that can be tested and changed on the fly. Surgient has been focused on this market from the start, and last October released Version 5 of its Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System (VQMS).

Surgient says its tools are more enterprise worthy than VMware's and, while we can't vouch for that, the venture-backed private company does have an impressive roster of large corporate customers, including Lockheed Martin, Starwood Hotels and Kraft Foods.

Erik Josowitz, Surgient vice president of product strategy, says half of the companies using VQMS employ it for regression testing of Microsoft patches, while the other half use it to test core enterprise applications.

In both cases, VQMS speeds the test process by consolidating test infrastructure and making it possible to automate the setup and teardown of complex test configurations on-demand.

Testing today is still very manual, Josowitz says. If you want to test SAP R/3, you need to find the appropriate number of servers, wipe them and load the software, load the database, load the data and then network the servers. "That can take two weeks," he says. With VQMS, once the images are in the system, deploying the test configuration takes minutes.

The system is also perfect for testing Microsoft patches, Josowitz says. Lockheed Martin has around 300 desktop configurations and it was taking six days to test patches on those configurations.

Consolidating the test environment on servers that could host 50 virtual configurations at a time, and bringing in VQMS and a mix of other tools to manage the process made it possible to test those 300 configurations in four to six hours and release the patches that night, Josowitz says.

HP's Mercury Quality Center is used to control the test, telling VQMS to load specific configurations, and Microsoft's Systems Management Server is used to deploy the patches. If bugs are found during the process, a snapshot is captured of that configuration for later analysis and the next configuration is loaded.