Hi,

We have a QA department that have to test our software on multiple combination of OS and DMBS. With Windows spewing out many different versions the combinatorial math of all this can be daunting. So we decided on visualizing our setups but so far it only displaces the problem. The cost of hardware is expensive and we need many different combination far exceeding your server capacity to deliver. Also, these instances are throw away, once the test is complete we no longer need it, furthermore to ensure proper test isolation we should start fresh from a new instance. Lastly we only need a small subset of these system online at any given time.

What I am looking for is a way to manage inventory so that our QA staff can order instances to be put online as required and discarded once used. Instances are spawned from a pool of freshly installed systems with the appropriate combination ready to accept our software. It also should be possible for two or more people to start the same instance at the same time, though we could manage without this if it proves too complex to put in place. Finally our budget is pretty thin, we can probably make some purchases but ideally expenditures should be kept to a minimum.

To summarize we should be able to :

• Bring instances online on demand. Ideally should offer queue and scheduling management
• Destroy instances on demand
• Keep masters in inventory but not online.
• Manage large inventory of VMs (30-100 maybe more) with small staff of users (5-10).
• Allow adding, deleting and changing instances from inventory (bring online, make changes and check back in, or create new and check in).
• Allow few long lived instances for support tools (normal VM server usage)

Thanks for your answers