Surgient Launches Microsoft Virtualization Solution for Lab Automation and IT Operations

Surgient today announced a number of initiatives in cooperation with Microsoft. The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform integrates with virtualized systems running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, providing IT and Quality Assurance professionals with self-service access to resources for testing IT services throughout the deployment process. Surgient’s approach streamlines VM lifecycle management and automates virtualized infrastructure, reducing capital and operating costs, and increasing user productivity.

Manual or semi-automated processes for deploying IT services are expensive and time-consuming, and create a daunting task for IT operations. The high rate-of-change of testing environments further exacerbates this challenge, creating the need for consolidation of testing infrastructure with virtualization, combined with enterprise-class lab automation, dynamic capacity management and self-service experience. With Surgient and Microsoft software, IT can streamline virtualized infrastructure management, automate resource administration, and provide an easy-to-use self-service interface for virtual resource users.

With lab, lifecycle and stage management, the Surgient Platform, with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, is a comprehensive solution for optimizing virtualized infrastructure.

The solution has been tested in Microsoft’s Enterprise Engineering Center in Redmond, Wash., against a complex, multi-tier SAP NetWeaver Architecture.

For the implementation, Microsoft and Surgient IT professionals were challenged with the traditional issues surrounding test environment deployment: underutilized compute capacity, difficult setup and teardown, and limited cloning and replication. To address these challenges, existing physical infrastructure and content was quickly virtualized using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager and then registered with the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform. The combination of Microsoft virtualization and Surgient automation resulted in: a dramatically improved deployment process, further resource consolidation, simultaneous deployment of identical multi-machine SAP configurations, and a self-service experience for end users.