OpenText Service Virtualization Reviews

My customers use it to replace the mainframe of each system that's difficult to provide in a test environment. We use virtualization or intelligent mockup.

It is easy to use. This is what I tell my customers. The coding is easier to develop as well.

The monitoring feature is not impressive because they use Windows for so much monitoring. They set a lock on the window, and then we have to gather the information from the main monitoring feature in the Windows server. There is not enough capacity for problem solving performance issues.

I've worked with this solution for six years.

Right now, the best platform for Micro Focus Service Virtualization is the Windows environment. Windows is somewhat less stable than Linux, and because Windows is not as stable, the maximum stability you can have with Micro Focus Service Virtualization is 70%.

The scalability is good.

The support for Micro Focus Service Virtualization is better than that for other products. The technical support staff are highly skilled. Sometimes, we don't have to open a ticket. We can just go into the community and then talk to them directly. I would rate technical support at seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is not complex, and it is easy to maintain.

It's an expensive solution, but you can get discounts. You have to buy one server and one designer together, for example, and it may cost 15 million Thai Baht.

Because of the price, Micro Focus Service Virtualization is not for everyone. For large companies with specific use cases, this solution may be the best way to go.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this solution at seven.

We are a solution reseller and Micro Focus Service Virtualization is one of the products that we provide to our customers.

There are many use cases and we have done a lot of work with this product, but one of the popular ones is company credit card virtualization.

The most valuable feature is SAP virtualization.

The integration with other solutions, such as ALM and Jira, should be improved.

Micro Focus Service Virtualization

Stability-wise, this product is very good.

The initial setup is simple.

The purpose for this tool is very obvious and Micro Focus covers it very well.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We implement this product for companies in the banking industry. We use virtualization to simulate and validate data models of the core banking system for the purpose of testing. When one application is implemented and accesses the testing phase, the test environment needed to connect to external/legacy system to fulfill test coverage. Test cases might cover both functionality and performance which sometimes external system faces the limitation to support.  

It is difficult to make test environments connect to the mainframe with required test data already in place, so we planned to use virtualization in this situation. Another use case for us has to do with performance testing. Many banking systems (public ones) facing performance issues in production have been identified that as impactful is not in the application itself. That means the test hasn’t been done well enough during the integration, most of them cause by limitation on test environment. Service virtualization with a performance model feature can help solve this situation.

When a test is covered, the risks in the production system are surely controlled.

The feature which is most valuable in this solution is the ease of use. The product is
very easy to use and implement. Another thing is that we can adjust the performance
level. We can make the model simulate the best service, normal services or bad
situations in many possible ways.

I think the place where this product has room for improvement is the protocol. The current protocol list needs to be updated to have much more coverage on technology. And the ability to implement customization within the tools. Currently, there is some limitation on the flexibility of the data logic as well as the configuration of portals and other things. So the protocol update is one thing and another is the ability to have more flexibility for customizations.

I have been using Service Virtualization for around four years.  

The product is stable. Sometimes there is an issue with the operating system, but normally, the product itself is stable enough.  

Scalability should not be an issue for an enterprise product. On the other hand, I think scalability can be better or easier to do. But I don't really have a good perspective on this because we have not yet experienced a situation where it was necessary to scale-up. Customers already design virtual service environments to cover beyond usable capacity since the first place.

However, if capacity really needs increasing we can raised them up around 30% without increasing hardware by using in-memory processing instead of database processing.

I am not impressed with the technical support provided by Micro Focus (for an official ticket). If I go to the user community and I raise an issue in there, I have been contacted by R&D and they help us to solve the problem. 

Actually, sometimes we use the tools that are not exactly in the category of
virtualization to do testing in a similar way. The tools are some kind of like an API
gateway where we can simulate virtualization. And there is another tool called
MounteBank, which is freeware. It can allow us to make a mock or stub server for
integration testing the same to virtual service.

However, we use it only in cases where the TPS or the scale of the capacity is not
projected to be very high. When we need enterprise software, then we switch. What
mean enterprise; 1) having official technical support 2) having R&D team and
roadmap 3) Having official customer reference and so on.

The initial installation is quite simple. The experienced team can take around 1-2 days to complete the installment. I also can do it by myself.

It takes only one person to do the setup but it is good to have a support team for some time infrastructure inaccessibility.

Micro Service Virtualization is expensive. The pricing of this product is in line with all
of the other big name-brand products. I think for Micro Focus that it would be a good
idea to make nice promotions for customers. For example, the new customer
in country and else.

We did not evaluate other solutions. In Thailand, right now, Micro Focus is the only product of this sort that is used for virtualization and testing of the banking system. IBM and CA also have this kind of software but they are not focused in my country we find some difficult to contact for doing POC.

The advice I would give to a client who is looking into purchase Micro Focus Virtualization would be that they have to know the clear benefits they will get and the concept of service virtualization. They have to know what shall be the replacement on which situations and the practice to do it. Also, they should to conduct a feasibility study and evaluate the ROI in a particular area. Then if they are clear on the purpose, do a proof of concept. If all are done, we suggested going ahead with the purchasing. The implementation is quite easy and updating is simple. 

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as an eight out of ten.

The whole service virtualization concept works on integration patterns, so the service virtualization should be supporting the regular RESTful services. However, it should also support services that listen and reply to MQs, generic JMS, SAP WebMethods integration server, universal messaging, or SAP virtualization database (or whatever virtualization you have, e.g., Java virtualization).

The support for these integration patterns and the ease of use to wizard-based utility is what I would consider the most important features for service virtualization platforms.

It has improve our organization a lot. For example, one of our very recent client's implementations that our Patson USA team did, we saved more than $15 million. This is in confirmed savings. In the past three and a half years of our implementation there, it helps you avoid the environment, get your software to production a lot faster, and reduces the wait times. That means it improves the productivity of your pre-production community. It also helps you in finding defects earlier if you can shift your testing left and integrate your application under test with virtual services.

With service virtualization, I'd love to see support for the Internet of things. I would love to see a web portal that the developers can use without consuming the virtual service designer license. This portal would be a lightweight utility where developers can put their own request response parameters for an already-created virtual service. This would really help in the DevOps culture.

More support for different protocols. I would love to see more wizards rather than relying on some custom coding, which you can use C# as well as Visual Basic scripting. In the service virtualization platform, I would love to see more wizard features as well as the ability to connect to an external database, which by the way, we have put an enhancement request in for. I'd love to see that in the service virtualization platform.

The service virtualization tool is perhaps one of the newest tools compared to its competitors, but it also means it has a very high degree of energy in it. From our experience, we have put more than 20 enhancement requests for the service virtualization platform and to the Micro Focus R&D team, based in Prague in the Czech Republic, who has been very approachable. They have taken our suggestions and they have actually implemented our enhancement requests, which is very nice to know.

The tool by itself is scalable. It does not have load-balancing capabilities, but the competitors don't either. I don't know if you really need to have that kind of capability, although that is one of the enhancement requests that we have been talking to Micro Focus about, and we'll continue to go down that path.

The tool is scalable. For example, we have about 60 or so services deployed to one single license of Micro Focus at any given time, of Micro Focus service virtualization. I would rate the stability and the scalability high up there.

Most of our tickets go to Micro Focus R&D. On the support side, I would say because service virtualization is newer compared to LoadRunner, most of our tickets get routed to R&D, as opposed to the LoadRunner, where most of the tickets get resolved at the first layer of support.

I was involved in the initial setup, and not just the software set up, but I was also involved in getting the right hardware configuration for that kind of workload. Our Patson USA team worked closely with HPE R&D (now Micro Focus R&D) to even figure out the CPU processor speed that would be needed to support 3,000 transactions per second, and HPE helped us out with that.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It is complex, but it is straightforward if you know what you're doing. There are various different ways you can set up the tool and that's where the complexity is. But, if you just want to do the traditional setup, it's very easy to do.

I was heavily involved with our Patson USA team when they were tasked with choosing the right platform for our clients and we evaluated all the competitors. We evaluated Cecilia, Parasoft, as well as IBM Green Hat, the Micro Focus service virtualization tool, and an open source, at that time, SmartBear also had service virtualization capability (I believe they do now, as well). We evaluated all of that. We put about 1500 criteria of what are we looking for in a service virtualization platform. We consulted with entire enterprise architecture teams. Many different teams collaborated with them and came up with that 1500 criteria, and this is how we were heavily involved in that decision-making.

In terms of its support and the technical abilities that it has, there are other tools. I'm not gonna name them, they have a higher degree of technical ability. Unfortunately, their support and their performance are not that great. You want to have a car. You don't want to have a Ferrari that doesn't work. You need to have a car that can get you from point A to point B, and HP service virtualization has been performed there.

Don't give up. It may sound very expensive at the beginning, but we have realized more than $15 million in savings at one of our major healthcare clients. It will really help you. Try working with your management to have them spend the money on getting a service virtualization platform.

The most valuable feature is that it reduces the dependency so that the down time of the environment is not a major cost. That cost can be used for something else like the cloud.

The important is thing is that Service Virtualization allows you, each and every individual, and each and every system, to be up at any time throughout the cycle.

That indirect cost impact is in the millions of dollars for any IT organization. The direct cause may be that the environment is down and that the tester is sitting for ten hours.

However, the indirect cost is that the end product is not achieving its release date. That is the business impact. If you look at the broader picture, the silos may be the Service Virtualization, but the end-to-end picture is that there is a huge impact, and that impact is actually priceless.

I cannot go and say that, "Okay, tomorrow I'm a mobile service. My apps are not going on mobile." So, I cannot calculate it, and I cannot write that particular dollar value, because I never know what it is.

For example, a sales platform may have the features that I have added, to give me a million dollar sale, or it may not. However, Service Virtualization allows you to release on time at least, so you can align with the strategy of your business.

It gives you granularity and transformation. My personal point of view is that Service Virtualization plays a major role in transforming your development, testing, and operating engineer into a business engineer.

The industry is moving towards Agile and DevOps. The most important thing is that each and every individual in your company is not thinking of themselves as individuals, but rather as if they are the end consumer, or running the business themselves.

Certain products have their own monopoly and they really don't want to share their market share. Service Virtualization enables you to share everything in terms of the protocol tier.

With a CRM system, you have all other systems integrated. You can virtualize and then the core system is CRM. And if you never virtualize, your own virtualization falls down. This is how it works.

I can use functional performer automation everywhere. However, the questions still remain of when and how I need to use it.

If I run a load test and I need a Service Virtualization, I can use the same asset. But when I'm using the same asset against the functional test, do I need to use it as is, or do I need to modify the workflow?

They must have that pace, but the product itself is up and coming as a new product in the market. Companies themselves are struggling to find out how they can align the technology with testing and developing practices, or where they can fit it into functional automation of performers or integration.

At the same time, there are a lot of emerging technologies coming onto the market. These other companies are saying that Service Virtualization leads to the first step, and then they realize that protocol leads to the fifth step.

The problem is that there is too much around. I hope that the company who manufactures a product will be more focused on how they can reduce this timeline distance by utilizing Service Virtualization.

If I have an in-house application in place, it allows me to pull information. If I can create an in-house environment manager, then I can go and buy some of the off-the-shelf products from the industry, and then I can do it.

This allows me to have that control of each Service Virtualization asset. It also tells me if somebody has done some sort of ideological testing, or ideological test flow. It will let me know how I can adopt that work flow and add my ideas. Alternatively, I can really go on his idea and tell the developer that the idea sounds great, but it should have been done another way.

The awareness of Service Virtualization needs to be improved. People still have doubts about having a virtual asset over a physical environment. They want to know if they are going to behave differently, or in a similar way.

They want to know if they are running everything through Service Virtualization if there will be some sort of compliance issue.

I see that it is the simulation of an actual environment, and that the compliance issue can be addressed. Most products are not provided with detailed information, and that creates a lot of hesitation in the market about whether they should adopt it or not.

If it is adopted, they need to know whether or not they're going to get a similar result to what they see in a physical environment.

They need to know if they have to educate their staff and if are they able to be educated prior to implementation for the amount of CapEx invested.

HPE products are good, but they never make a product for a specific use. They make a product for the enterprise because that is their vision. They like multi-generational business plans. That means that they don't deliver small bits and pieces, but rather, they deliver to the enterprise.

When you talk about a complex domain like Service Virtualization, and when you talk about delivering such a wide landscape product, it has to go through lot of improvement cycles.

They are doing it. They are putting forth hard effort. They are putting in dollars, manpower, and they are hiring good techs. We respect that and hopefully they will arrive to the point where they will be able to compete in the market and become one of the dominant leaders, or THE dominant leader for Service Virtualization.

When you have business potential, why not spend money on R&D? Anybody will spend, and rather than being led by their CEO, R&D is being led by their customers who are thinking in the same direction.

The protocol maturity, the technology maturity, is about to come. The Service Virtualization is the first case, and it is not marketed well by any of the vendors. It should have a very strategic view. That is also missing.

The most important thing is that more and more customers need to be involved in lunch and learn sessions where get they can get feedback so the program is not run by product companies.

If you really go to the networking, infra, and other ADM spaces, you have a bunch of them running it, but not in this particular space.

Service Virtualization is not stable in the market right now, if you really check the technology behind it.

We majored a system in an OSI reference model, so we skipped most layers as well as apps and session tiers where traffic is recorded.

I have a web server, an application server, a file server, and a database server that takes a normal user work floor. If a user comes, they log in, and the traffic flows in. Service Virtualization allows you to record it, and simulate the way it's supposed to be simulated in a real environment.

I would like to define the stability of a critical system, for example, with the mainframe. We are still struggling with how to create APIs in Service Virtualization to talk with our AS/400 system and with a couple of CRM systems that are so proprietary that you cannot even record a set out of them.

Protocols are constantly changing. If you asked me ten years ago how many protocols I was using, I could give a number.

However, today, it's not X, it's X plus Y, plus Z. This keeps growing, and the product, and the companies who are making the Service Virtualization product are unable to keep up that pace.

In terms of scalability, I have designed one of the biggest Service Virtualization systems where I'm running a bunch of assets.

In my opinion, I have seen the scalability and I know that it goes from the network to the apps.

In terms of technology, the scalability is good and robust. It varies from industry to industry, and it is dependent on your business model and your technology landscape. There are a lot of “ifs and buts”.

I did use technical support. My personal view is that HPE is maturing in the Service Virtualization domain. They have a long way to go.

We were not using a different solution. One of my customers wanted to make sure that they heard about it, and they wanted to go in that direction.

Then I went to the market, performed a lot of Google research, and then I called a vendor. They came in and did a lot of presentations to help the customer to understand what they have. Then, we had our own matrix in place while the vendor selection took place and we decided which product to take.

We contacted the top three vendors again and asked their solutions architect to design a prototype in our environment. We identified tone prototype that had a good thing, but two had nothing. At the end of the day, nobody was perfect, but HPE was the best.

I'm not normally involved in the setup. We usually have a process in place, where we follow the enterprise architect cycle.

It is not like I just go and get the product. I have to make sure that the product is stable. I have to ask if it has the ability to design a prototype and whether or not it fits.

I was involved in that. I ran a cycle and I identified a product. It took a long time to explain to people how to create assets and build up the communication collaboration.

We had to go through an eight to twelve month cycle to make them understand how to set up the actual tools and learn where they needed to use them.

It was probably a two year plan, or roadmap, to educate our staff, but we succeeded. It is one of the most successful projects that give us millions of dollars in ROI. There was a lot of integration, so it was great fun to work on, to learn, and it is a very good teaching tool as well.

It's a complex system and eventually it becomes straightforward. It's simple for an individual to use, but complex when you have the entire organization adopting it.

You should stay and stick with it for a minimum of eighteen months to two years. You will then see a lot of ROI out of it. The ROI may be less in terms of dollar value, but the long term ROI is very good.

I have done it personally. I drew up an end-to-end implementation and the whole process implementation along with the technology. I have a proven experience behind it.

I don't want to provide any names, but there are many other players in the market, from thirty-year old companies to newer two-year old ones. They all are doing well. They all provide benefits to their respective domains.

If you ask me, everybody is trying and definitely HPE is among the market leaders. They really perform good market research and have good expertise with a good amount of dollars invested.

I don't just go and purchase by name, by product, or by need. Here’s my process:

1. I would go and explore a minimum of three different vendors.
2. Bring them in-house, ask them to design a prototype, and perform a PoC.
3. Study the vendor profile, how good they are with you in your journey, and where your IT is moving.
4. Follow the end-to-end processes, because it gives you enterprise framework vision, of how your IT landscape is going to look.
5. Then do the selection based on your financial technology, maintenance, support, and your comfort, and see if your organization's needs are matching.

Use these five major criteria, I usually call them five finger criteria, and the one that ticks the most products is the product that you select.

Service Virtualization is one of the great tool sets coming into the market. It's really going to change the industry.

In order to release my product on schedule, the development and testing time becomes one of the major challenges, although it is not only challenge.

Other challenges include dependency and time consumption. On the other hand, the industry is dealing with a big shift in transformation from legacy to brownfield, and from brownfield to greenfield. We have a separate greenfield layout going on.

When I have a tough integration, a very complex integration system, and when I'm going to roll out my product quickly, I'm looking at concepts like DevOps and Agile, where time to market is going to be much less.

I have to expedite my testing and development. To do that expedition, I have to make sure my pre-production staging integration environments are fully ready. If they are not ready, I'm unable to achieve my desired goal.

It plays a very vital role in this whole cycle, where you can really create a Service Virtualization asset. An asset may be your environment, a web service, or even a single call. We create that asset and we reduce the dependency.

As an example, if I want to virtualize my Telco system, I need payment and billing gateway services. I also need some sort of verification services from the third party vendor. So, rather than building an environment, I will create a Service Virtualization payment asset such as a Visa.

I then use this Visa environment for the billing system, so I can create an asset. I can recall that asset as many times as I want to in my different testing scenarios.

REST and SOAP virtualization; we are a very heavy service-oriented company and very reliant on third-party services. Having the ability to test independently without development delay for integration has been very critical for our ability to deliver.

Teams have reduced the amount of delayed development effort it takes to roll out a new product by leveraging a virtual service for development and then meeting up for a final integration test when it is complete. The tool has been highly useful for edge case and negative test case efforts by QA as well as useful for high-volume levels of performance testing against third-party endpoints.

The data-driven model is painful at best. The usage of Excel can be cumbersome for larger services being virtualized. Having an SQL-based implementation would be far more usable. Also, the requirement of an SQL Server database for each individual user of the Designer tool is overkill. A shared schema would be better.

I have used it for two years.

No deployment or stability issues, and the tool scales fantastically.

I use a reseller for my support needs; it’s been fantastic when needed.

Initial setup was extremely easy; just a typical Windows installation wizard and it took me no time to get this deployed.

I implemented this tool myself. Go download it from the HPE website and try it out; it’s easy!

The Enterprise Server gives us what we need for performance testing. I think one Designer license is sufficient with the introduction of the Community Designer license now. Identifying ROI for this tool has been a challenge for us to prove out still.

Seriously, download it and try it. If you can virtualize your services with the tool with limited effort, then it’ll be the right choice for you.

It is quite quit easy to set up and use.

The solution saved quite a bit of the cost of the hardware. The cost has really gone down.

So far it's okay. I would like them to reduce the cost of the licenses.

The stability is good. I would say it's okay.

The scalability is quite good.

We used technical support once in a while. The support is fantastic. Their response, expertise, and knowledge is quite good.

We were using IBM virtualization and Microsoft. We looked at quite a number of solutions and we ended up with the HPE product. Before we chose HPE, we had to do a proof of concept, and we liked what we saw.

I wasn’t involved in the setup, but I heard from my colleagues who said the first setup was a bit challenging. However, with support from the HPE team, it was good. We were able to sort out the issues that came up.

What we looked for to select a solution was ease of use, scalability, cost, and professionalism in terms of the people who do the implementation.

• HPE Service Virtualization Designer


• Virtual services learning and recording data: We can keep virtual services in learn mode, simulate mode, etc., which is very good and everything is automatic. One can view the requests learned and change simulated data.


• HPE Service Virtualization portal: There’s a similar feature in portal where we can park services in different modes.


• Deploy and undeploy with a single click is an awesome feature.

Performance testing and infrastructure costs were reduced because of virtual services.

Dependency on other teams was reduced, where we are expecting live services from them and they are not available. We can create virtual services in a few minutes with a few clicks using mocked data. This is awesome.

There were minor version compatibility issues between HPSV project files while importing to the workspace, but these have already been addressed in recent versions. And same with stability.

I used it for 1.3 years.

Sometimes it stops working after switching remote and local servers.

Initial setup was simple and straightforward.

When you are living with a lot of web services, it's worth having this product.

We moved recently from HPE Service Virtualization to Parasoft.

• Mock virtualization: I don't need to wait for the entire application to be developed before I can begin testing integrations and possibly new features. That makes my development more agile and safe, in addition to speeding up my functional and load tests.
• Reduced risk and faster release cycles through earlier functional and load testing

• It helps my developers share services and access them, and eliminates the need to create and maintain stubs
• It reduces redundant work (doing the same work twice only for testing).
• My developer team is more agile right now.

• The developers area
• Performance testers

I have used it for more than five years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Technical support is 9/10. They provide great service.

It's easy to install and easy to use.

Implementation was a great experience.

Low TCO

I had a trial of CA SV, but HPE is more intuitive and easy to use.

HPE SV helped me and my ALM team minimize workforce, reduce costs, and transition from hardware to virtualization; my software is more secure preproduction. That's fundamental for any company.

The data model and agents are easy to use and configure. Also, the logging functionality is very good.

This product has provided us the capability to virtualize dependent systems, which has resulted in the following improvements to our organization:

• More productivity
• No dependency on third-party systems
• Faster test execution cycles

HP should work on providing better scripting support and include more communication and transport protocols. HP doesn't support many standard communication and transport protocol like Swift, FIX, EDI, MICS etc. Also the scripting functionality is in beta testing and not completely released so it may break at any time.

I have used it for one year.

The latest version, 3.81, is pretty stable.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is Excellent! The R&D team is excellent.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Use the server version; it might cost less.

We evaluated ITKO LISA and IBM RIT, but considering our requirements and cost, we found HP SV much more suitable for us.

Check the protocols supported in the product.