Testing is Rocket Science Not Brain Surgery

This is a reference to a very popular series of movies that went by the name of “The Matrix” and it’s various sequels. The answer to this question serves as an inflection point for the main character who is given an opportunity to continue to carry on in life as he had before, or to embrace an unknown reality. This same decision is on my mind as I examine performance and automation testing infrastructure (PATI), storage concerns, and infrastructure management. I’m wondering how I might consolidate my existing hardware resources while looking to grow them going forward in a seamless and expeditious fashion. I’m examining how long it takes to provision a desktop or server, asking why I’m honestly compelled to just go and buy everything myself and expense it later assuming the risk of a capital expenditure. I’m assessing hardware platforms and OSes to arrive at a conclusion on which one yields the most bang for the buck. I’m walking down the laundry list of questions that go with the decision to virtualize, the decision to take the red pill and change the way I implement PATI from now on.

Given my bias towards the win32/win64 platform I’m going to go with VMWare, whose stock has served me well and laid the foundation for this adventure. I’ll either be selling my shares or pumping the stock on a message board in a few weeks as this plays out. But the first order of business is to actually see virtualization in action by getting Ubuntu loaded up from a pre-built image via VMWare Player and go from there. I’ve been intrigued by this OS despite not seeing any enterprise level application support for it, so this is more of a personal experiment. To provide something applicable to our craft I’ll also go with a Red Hat image to begin a comparison of load generator performance between it and a Microsoft OS offering that is comparable to a RedHat Linux Advanced Server 3.0 Red Hat distro. The hope is that this comparison will be relatively simple to execute through the wonders of a virtualized desktop. But first we’ve got to get through the installations.

Here’s to the spirit of adventure, and hoping I don’t choke on a poison pill of my own creation.

Cheers!