Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

We use it for the virtualization of third-party APIs for performance testing.

Our second use case is related to the virtualization of TCP/IP protocols for third-party terminal insurance, which is used for insurance clients.

In the case of the virtualization of TCP/IP protocols for third-party terminal insurance, there was a device terminal, which was interacting with the application via the TCP/IP protocol. Most of the tools don't support that, but we were able to achieve it using Broadcom Service Virtualization.

The cost is an area that needs improvement. There are a couple of other tools which provide support for performance testing with the base version itself, but Broadcom needs a separate component to support virtualization for performance testing. This is a costly component.

We have been using it in the current project for the last six months. It's deployed on the cloud.

It is stable.

It should be scalable.

We had to reach out to technical support for some help regarding the TCP/IP virtualization, and we received good support from them and were able to implement the solution as per the planned timeline.

The deployment is simple.

It was deployed in the client's environment by the service provider.

Our clients have seen an ROI.

There is a yearly licensing cost, and I would give it a four out of five.

It is a very good tool with support for a variety of protocols and has a user-friendly UI and other scripting features as well. I will give it a rating of nine out of ten.

We mark up several APIs from web servers, JMS, and MQ Services with this solution. We use it to support our performance testing. Some of the virtual services that have been built by this solution will support somewhere around 2000 to 3000GPS perfectly.

There are several areas that are easily configurable. A person, without having a lot of development experience, should be able to perform most of the functions.

There are many different features available to build services with adequate response times, recording of visitors.

Because I have not compared it with other toolsets, I don't have a lot of insight. The only area that I can think of at the moment is the building of automated APA test cases. Based on your services, this is an area that requires improvement.

I would like to have more flexibility towards the mainframe virtualization and also in JDBC virtualization.

I have been working with Broadcom Service Virtualization, CA Dev Test CA Service Virtualization, hands-on for the last ten years.

We are using the latest version of this solution.

We have a closed set of people in our organization who are using this product. 

This solution has been consumed by a wide variety of projects. 

We have approximately 30 users who are using it.

We have great support, even though we do not have an enterprise agreement.

In terms of stability and scalability, if we have had any issues, we have great support.

With support, it depends on the level. If it is level one, you can call. If it is level two, they will issue a support ticket and it will be addressed within 8 to 12 hours.

Tier three and tier four is knowledge-based, and you are referred to their portal, and also communities. 

We can look into it and search for customers with similar issues, and they have detailed solutions.

If you are not able to resolve your issue then the support team will assist you with your issue.

Previously, we were not using any other tools.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We did not use a vendor or reseller. We completed the implementation in-house.

I don't have the exact dollar amount, but we have spent close to $1,000,000 for a three-year agreement, for an enterprise level. 

Any number of people can use it, and it has three performance inputs and any number of functional servers.

We have been comparing it with other tools. 

Broadcom is expensive when compared to other open-source or low-cost toolsets. 

We have been doing the feasibility with other low-cost tools and the use cases that were supported with Broadcom were not supported by ReadyAPI. This is why we chose to go with Broadcom Service Virtualization.

I would recommend this product to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Broadcom Service virtualization a nine out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is for creating virtual services, creating API testing, and creating virtual data.

The most valuable features are the recording and creating of virtual services. Especially in creating IBM MQ virtual services through recording.

The learning curve is an area that needs improvement, as well as stability and performance.

Stability has to be improved. It is not a stable solution. Especially, when you create custom solutions there are issues with memory accumulation. I would prefer that they stop adding features, which is what they do. Instead, focus on stabilizing it and make it work. 

What's the point of adding new features? It just increases the cost.

I'll give you an example; CA and I have continuous applications, and insight is one of the service activation components. It has never worked in any project, just for the namesake and for showing they have this one. 

Support needs improvement, they don't support the migration from an older version to the current version.

The price can be reduced.

This portal, after one week, if it is enterprise-assigned, will stop working. Now we have a policy that every week, we have a scheduled restart of everything, and maintain it. The stability is so poor that this is what is required. 

Broadcom acquired it recently, approximately a year ago. Broadcom was not involved with the software before. They were known for having a history with the hardware, physical devices, and appliances. 

Now, they are focusing on both. Much of their technical expertise, have gone. There is no expertise.

I have been working with Broadcom Service Virtualization for approximately five years.

It's not stable.

This solution is scalable, but it also relies on the stability factor.

If the client wants to add a new component or new hardware, it can be done, but for how long will it be stable? It will not be stable. 

I'll add it to a new sequence in the virtual environment. When it's added, the port will not display and we have to reset everything.

After everything is added there is a new challenge. With the amount of data that it has to handle it causes memory leak issues. The memory accumulation usually happens and then it gets stopped, then has to be restarted. 

Stability is still a huge issue. In one way we have a solution that scales, with provisions that are easy for scaling, but the stability is not there.

It's scalable, but as you scale you will encounter stability issues.

The technical support only supports recent versions, even if there are some critical issues.

For example, I was in 10.1. and now using the current version 10.6, but they have stopped supporting 10.1. When I had to migrate from 10.1 to 10.6, we had experienced some issues.

When contacting technical support they don't support the migration, because it's internal, and they ended our support. Once the support is ended for 10.1, you can't get it back.

The support and questions are tool-related, only. If there are some that are at a project level that we may have customized then they say it's beyond their support. At this point, it would require separate tools and advanced services. This would also incur an additional fee. 

For simple issues with current versions and for managing the tool, or for learning the tool, then technical support available. 

For project level and implementations, the technical support is not good.

Previously, I was using SoapUI for creating MockServices. I have also used WireMock. These two tools I have used.

Comparing to those, the differences are that both version services can be run locally.

I am a developer and I can create a local virtual service. I can create and deploy to a central location, which can avoid a lot of duplication. That is the key difference. 

Other tools for creating a stable service require some effort. Here, the new creation is managed.

The most recent version is not simple.

It's not easy and especially when you want to set up a distributed architecture, it gets a bit complex. For that, also, when we need something complex then true expertise is needed.

I am the specialist and a part of the team for managing this solution.

We implemented it ourselves with the occasional help from CA support.

There are additional fees for advanced-level technical support.

Our services are offered to all of our clients. Once they have purchased the product, we offer services and centrally configure this for others who have this feature. It's free. Instead of each and every project team buying their own products, we centrally buy it, we centrally manage the environment, and we provide it to the rest of the teams. This provides a way of cost-cutting and interacting.

This solution is definitely for large enterprise companies, not suitable for a small or medium-sized company. With large enterprise companies, we can use freeware tools. There are several freeware tools available.

Complex protocols are also available and can be applied only for large enterprise companies.

My recommendations are that this solution is best suited for large organizations and for internally running their referral services. If you want, the requirements are simple.

You can use the freeware that is available. Or, if you want to use it for a central log, then use it, develop and enhance it more. The development technicians will assist you if you want to run this securely as a centralized enterprise-level solution.

I would recommend this solution for large organizations. Nonetheless, they have to make a lot of improvements.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

1. By virtualization, for all dependent services, we are able to create isolated test environments.
   
2. We virtualize fragile services and deploy them with the 'Failover' mode so that we can fall back to the VS in case the real service returns an error.
3. We virtualize third-party paid services, as well as in-development services, to minimize costs and delays.

In short, we are able to save a lot of valuable time. Testers and developers no longer complain about not having access to dependent services. We don't have to share/reserve resources or worry about our development being blocked by unavailable services.

The ability to create virtual services and deploy them as Docker containers, and include them in our Jenkins build pipelines, is a valuable feature.

It was critical for us to prevent possible elements from "unnecessarily" breaking the pipeline. If I'm pushing a particular web service through the pipeline and want that to be tested in isolation, it is a big problem if everything fails due to an irrelevant dependent service.

The use of containers provided a very flexible solution.

The workstation component has a very out-dated UI and is in dire need of a facelift.

There are too many fragmented web components that could easily and logically be merged. For example, Service Catalog, Enterprise Dashboard, Portal, and Identity and Access Manager are all separate web applications. Why not merge them in one web app?

This is a very mature and very stable product, although error prevention could be added into the product, for the sake of improving user-friendliness.

The idea of Virtual Service Environments (VSE) makes the product extremely scalable. Especially with the use of containers, you won't have concerns about resource wastage.

This solution has first-class support, and it couldn't be any better.

I used HPE SV before. It was very user-friendly but cannot be compared with CA DevTest, as it lacks a lot of the important features.

This initial setup of this solution is not straightforward at all. The installation is unnecessarily complex. Again, user-friendliness is not an area that CA DevTest can boast about.

We use this tool to be more agile and deliver daily releases to production, shortening the development cycle.

It hasn't matured enough yet to provide good prospects; we are still in the process of implementation. I can't tell you if anything in the process has improved or not, but the objective is to use this DevTest tool to shorten the development cycle. It hasn't proved itself yet. We've had it for a short time so I can't tell you if we succeeded or not.

The most valuable features include the capability to use other program languages such as PLSQR, JAVA, .NET. This is important because whenever the tool is limited you can extend it by writing your own code. The code is not limited to a specific language, it can hold several types of coding language.

CA Service Virtualization has its pros and cons. It's a strong framework and the feedback is good, however when it comes to acting as a test tool some improvements are required.

UI should be more user friendly: better usability, more testing oriented. This product emerged from the services virtualization domain and evolved to include application testing. They are very good in service virtualization, but in application testing they need to make some improvements. One of these improvements is to be more test oriented, which will allow the user to manage and control the test execution better and to organize the packages in a better, more user-friendly way. The users should be able to organize the test, test suites, and execution in a better way, such that scenarios can be integrated into the testing part. Currently its outside.

The application test should be more feature rich. I would also like to see seamless integration with DevOps. Currently it needs some scripting to integrate with DevOps.

It is very stable.

Very scalable. It's a strong framework, stable and scalable in a really good session.

When we started API and vacant testing, we needed a tool to support it. We did some research in the market and this solution has most of our requirements: it's stable, feature rich, and has many years in the market. This solution stood out as the best fit for our requirements. They are number one in service virtualization, although they are definitely not number one in application testing.

It was very complex, since it is a tool that is integrated with lots of software parts: all the servers, the middleware, the UI, etc. Integrating it in the development environment was really not straightforward. It took us several weeks to stand on our feet.

There were four vendors on the short list: 

• CA Service Virtualization
• SOAtest by Parasoft
• Green Hat (now Rational Integration Tester) by IBM.
• ReadiAPI by SmartBear

We chose CA as it fulfilled most of our requirements.

I would give CA an eight out of ten. It could be a ten on service virtualization, but it's definitely a 6 or 7 in the application testing area. These two are combined into one product (CA DevTest), so the overall total comes to an 8.

When selecting a vendor, our most important criteria is based on which areas are supported. As we are an enterprise, we have rich environments with many types of platforms and the most important requirement is that the tools will support these rich environments, protocols, technologies, and platforms.

In the end, your choice depends on what goal is more important to you: services virtualization or application tests. If it's services virtualization, go for DevTest; if it's application testing, then you should think twice.

On the testing side of the functionality, there are a few things that are missing. For instance, a comparative report. But since it's open source, we can add the extension and we do this by ourselves.

It is quite stable.

I would rate the tech support a nine out of ten. They need more knowledge about the connectivity to DevOps orchestration.

I think the pricing is quite fair because this solution provides a lot of functionalities, and is quite stable.

The ability to do parallel development and testing reduces our costs for duplicating environments, improving the productivity of our developers, and bringing products faster to market. 

As far as the next version of it is concerned, probably some additional lightweight, portable elements. For instance, we would like to not have to rely on deploying things to a server, be able to carry it and make it more portable (maybe through the mobile devices), etc. Some of the mobility aspects are what we are looking for, and I do not mean running it on a mobile device when I say mobility, but being able to port it between workstations, and being able to take it and work with it at a smaller scale.

It is a very stable product given that by the time we got into it. We were in version 9.x, but it looks like about 10 years has elapsed between the time the product came out and where it is now. That ought to provide it some sense of stability, and also some guidance as to what the company needs to do to make it a stable product. 

It is definitely scalable. The licenses that we have purchased, we have not utilized them fully. However, given our conversations with the CA product team and the use cases that we have outlined for them, we are pretty confident that it is scalable.

We actually stumbled upon it both in terms of good luck and prior experience. Prior experience, not from our perspective, but from one of our VPs, who happen to work at CA before he came to our organization. Combined with a need from us to not invest in additional development environments for some of our flow-through work, where applications needed to talk to multiple other systems. Also, when we were working on multiple projects, we had a need to duplicate those environments, which resulted in having to spend extra money on it. 

What we stumbled upon was the Service Virtualization tool that our previous VP had worked with, remembered about it, and we started investigating, which led to our investment in the product. 

I would definitely rate it as a nine. Simply because I think any product obviously has some inherent flaws in it. That is the reason why they are upgraded. It would be foolish to say it is a 10 right off the bat. 

Virtualizing mainframe systems. Reducing dependency on mainframe capacity and availability, which is a major roadblock for us right now.

The virtualization is primarily performed by eliminating the back end mainframe system. So we can read out our API traffic to the virtualized system. Basically, we don't have to use the mainframe while our service is virtualized.

It helps us with work/life balance. If we didn't have that CA Service Virtualization, we would have to run our performance tests during the night, because that's when the mainframe is least used. For our team members it helps them to maintain a better work/life balance, as they can execute their tests in the daytime so they don't have to spend the weekends and nights doing so.

To us, right now, it is going to be reducing the capacity limitation on mainframe, because we are highly dependent on mainframe capacity which is not easily available to us.

Regarding additional features for future releases, that is something we'll come to know when we start using it at full scale. But so far, we're pretty content with what has been offered.

In terms of improvements, I think a little bit more of use cases from existing clients. That could show that it's a workable solution used with other clients as well.

Stability is pretty good so far. We have used it across our organization in different teams. So the next step for us is to bring it to performance testing.

Scalability is the next factor we have to judge, because this system has to handle a large amount of load, so we'll have to see what the scalability is going to be. But based on the reviews and research, we think it's going to be as per of our expectations.

We have had business partners, account managers, come and do the PoC for us, proof of concept, so we have used their support. 

Support has been great so far. They have come to the table whenever we needed them. They have provided all the support in a timely manner so, so far so good.

We made the move because of a constraint that we have today. It's a constraint with mainframe capacity and availability. This is basically an opportunity for us to remove that constraint and that's why we need Service Virtualization.

We have completed the PoC, so I would say since we haven't completely set it up. So far, whatever the setup has done, we're satisfied with it.

We evaluated other options, I'd say lightly, very lightly, because we have used CA within our company from a while. We know that they are the market leader, we know there are probably not many competitors for the tool that we want to use.

When selecting a vendor what's important to us is 

• a relationship with the vendor
• their response to us in a timely manner and
• especially, their being established, having proven their solution with other clients.

I give it an eight out of 10, based on our experience so far. Once we use it at full scale, we'll come to know if there are any more improvements or challenges that need to be addressed.

I would tell colleagues to keep CA as the number one priority to research because they are the market leader and have the most experience, based on our research. I think they should be one of the top contenders for service virtualization.

To give you an example, we have had developers produce code later than we wanted to, but we've had some other stuff that was dependent on that. So what we were able to do was virtualize these assets and then go forward with our developer and not have to wait for these additional services to be available.

We have been using it extensively for the shift left process and testing. It helps us to accelerate and virtualize services and assets that we don't have. It enables to test faster.

From a reporting perspective I think we would like to have a more user-friendly approach. I think that's primarily where we would like to see some improvement. Otherwise we are pretty happy with what we have.

It has been very stable for us. We have been pretty happy with its use.

We are able to quickly scale our requests. We have tested across thousands of requests. We have had no problems so far.

Technical support has been excellent for this product. CA has always been available for us when we had questions and they have helped resolve any issues that we have had quickly, and in a very efficient manner.

We didn't have a solution beforehand. Essentially, we had to wait for developers to give us the code. What this helped us to do is get over that bottleneck and not wait for assets to be available. We were able to quickly go out and have the testing or automation team build out a solution beforehand, based on the contract, and then go forward.

I would rate it pretty highly. It would be close to 10 out of 10 for how it helped solve our needs.

It allows you to have a bunch of manual testers who can easily use the tool set, as well as hardcore devs or SDETs who know how to code. They can also use the tool set.

And, on the virtualization side, it really kind of helps you save money, because you can unblock yourself. If something's not ready, you can go and virtualize that, unblock your automation. We actually found in the last project that we should have used more virtualization, because our environment wasn't really stable. And so, we should have virtualized the things that we were automating so that we could demonstrate the automation wasn't the problem. That was always a question mark for people, and so that's a takeaway that I'll do again on the next project.

A couple of the most valuable features, to me, are the fact that you can have a lot of different people with different technologies use the tool, without any programming experience at all, all the way up to people who can program. And then, the more technical that you are, the more programming you have, the more you're able to customize the tool. Basically customize it to do what you want it to do. That's one thing. 

The other thing is, it's got probably the greatest amount of features, in terms of different technologies that you can automate and virtualize, out of any of the solutions out there. So, it really can accomplish any task that you want to do with it.

I really want to see more of the "express" kind of model, where you get a little bit for free. I'd love to be able to see you be able to edit and author tests without having to be connected to a licensed server. And then, if you want to go and execute tests, then you go and connect to the server. That's a request I've been making, and I'd like to see that. I think it's in line with the open source model, and I think it would unblock people to be able to do a lot more work from home or from remote places, where they can't really connect to the server.

It's very stable. It's very robust. 

I have noticed that sometimes memory consumption can get high if you use the tool repeatedly. But, it's pretty manageable. It's come a long way. I've used it for multiple versions, and I'm on version 10 now, and I'm very happy with the stability. 

It's very scalable. The server, we've actually scaled it up quite a bit. One of the projects I was on, we were running thousands of tests, and the server wasn't really set up to handle that. So, we increased the amount of coordinators, and RAM, and processing power. And, just by making those small changes, we were easily able to scale to, like, thousands and thousands of tests. I'm happy with the scalability.

I wasn't using any previous solution. When I came to T-Mobile, SV was a fairly new tool at T-Mobile. So, we didn't have any other previous solution. We used this one, and none of the other solutions that have been out there have been better, so we've kept using it. Didn't need to switch, and we have been continuing to invest in it, because it's been meeting and exceeding our needs.

I give it between an eight and a nine out of 10. I don't ever really give 10s, because I always think that things can be improved, so it's a great product.