Virtual Machine Automation
Supported Virtual Machines
Using virtual machines is a good alternative to using physical computers in software development and especially in software testing. Automated Build Studio includes several dozens of operations that enable you to automate various operations on most popular virtual machines:
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Microsoft Virtual PC
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Microsoft Virtual Server
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Microsoft Hyper-V
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VMware Server
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VMware Workstation
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VMware vSphere
Automated Build Studio also includes operations for managing Amazon EC2 cloud machines. See Amazon Cloud Automation.
Benefits of Virtual Machine Automation
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With Automated Build Studio, you can easily copy virtual machine files; register, run, pause, resume, reboot, enumerate virtual machines, connect to and disconnect from them, and perform other VM-related actions. machines. You don't have to create special programs or write script code for virtual machine automation. All the actions are configured visually, and automation can be done by both experienced and inexperienced users.
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With Automated Build Studio operations you can easily prepare the environment needed for your builds or for distributed or load tests. For instance, you can run several virtual machines and build various modules of your software package on them in parallel, or you can create macros that copy virtual machines from some server repository and run automated tests on the operating systems that were not changed by previous installations.
After a virtual machine has been started and available in a network, the work with it does not differ much from the work with a physical remote computer. So, you can use all the available Build Studio operations to automate the needed tasks. There are two features that make this easier:
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Virtual machine engines typically have no means to control processes running on supervised virtual machines. However, you can use standard means of remote control over processes on virtual computers. One of the most reliable tools for the Windows operating systems is Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). This is a Microsoft implementation of the WBEM protocol (Web-Based Enterprise Management) that defines the standards of access to data in enterprise networks. Automated Build Studio includes built-in support for WMI enabling you to safely control processes, services, registry and other resources of remote computers (both virtual and physical).
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For security reasons, Microsoft did not implement the ability to remotely launch an interactive process via WMI. This may limit your ability to run UI and functional tests on remote machines. To work around this limitation, the Automated Build Studio package includes the RunInteractive.exe utility that makes it possible to launch interactive processes even if the application is running as a non-interactive process.
Read the following article to get the idea of using Automated Build Studio for running TestComplete automated tests on remote computers and virtual machines:
» Automated Application Testing on Multiple Operating Systems
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