Application development and Virtual Server

Application development and Virtual Server

Enterprises are looking for ways to accelerate application and infrastructure installations and upgrades, while at the same time reducing costs and maintaining a high level of quality. However, test coverage for high-quality applications requires replicating production environments in isolated test environments, straining budgets and schedules.

Virtual ServerĀ 2005 can be used in situations that require rapid and frequent server reconfiguration, as required with development and testing, product demonstrations, and training. Virtual Server also conserves hardware resources. You no longer need to use a hard disk to deploy an environment onto a development, test, or training computer. With Virtual Server, you can use space on a single hard disk to support multiple test and training environments.

Note

If you are running a large number of virtual machines on a single instance of Virtual Server, you may encounter performance issues. For more information about sizing your servers, see System requirements for Virtual Server.

Enterprises can obtain the following benefits by using Virtual Server to set up development, test, and training environments:

  • Rapid, cost-effective setup of server environments. Once you have created virtual hard disks and run Sysprep on them, they can be quickly and easily deployed on multiple computers. For more information, see Ways to deploy an operating system to a virtual machine.
  • Increased developer productivity. The amount of time developers must spend setting up environments is greatly reduced.
  • Increased flexibility. Hardware can be used to run multiple environments and can be quickly repurposed.

For more information about other scenarios in which deploying Virtual Server can be beneficial, see Virtual Server Usage Scenarios.