More on testing

My good friend Dallas Legan recently blogged on the subject of software testing. He raised some very interesting points about web application testing as well as non web app testing.

I also recently blogged on testing as well.

Dallas brings up some very good points in regards to putting a testing framework at the virtualization layer. Until recently I was a very heavy VmWare user and proponent. However I have recently been exposed to OpenVZ and will never ever go back to VmWare to run linux guests on linux hosts. The power of container/operating system virtualization, the performance gains, the tie in with the host.... its so amazing. Solaris has something similiar called Zones.

I am amazed that thus far no one has considered the virtualization layer an ideal place for testing, information assurance etc. However its a perfect place. In fact as more and more applications and workloads are accepted and certified for virtual operation, it becomes the only place. Common wisdom seemed to shy away from virtualizing workloads that are very I/O bound, but with container/operating system virtualization, I now believe that a 100% virtualized environment is possible. Even for things that are very I/O intensive and require low latency such as Voice over IP applications, databases, e-mail servers etc.

So in a fully virtualized environment (including the network components with the power of software switches such as VDE, Linux Virtual Server for load balancing, SQUID for content caching and on and on ) one begins to see that testing, integration and deployment become vastly simpler.

More on this subject later.