OpenText Service Virtualization Reviews

Some of the key differentiators of this tool –

• Easy to use.
• Built-in integration with HP tools like LoadRunner, ALM and UFT.
• Built-in integration with revision control software.
• Support for multiple technologies including SAP.
• Support for network virtualization.
• Ability to control virtual services from ALM, HP ServiceTest, LoadRunner, UFT.

1. HP SV tool currently doesn’t support integration with Test Data Management tools which are used to simulate large volume of realistic data using various techniques. By integrating virtualization with TDM, testing penetration will be more.
2. HP SV currently supports response data to be stored only in Excel sheets but the support should be extended to store the response data in an external database so that maintenance will be much easier.

Some features which have been added in a later version are 

• Support for integration with TDM tools for more test coverage and to mimic production like data setup.
• Support for database connectivity for storing external data and using it in virtual service responses.
• Support for creating custom agents that allow developers to virtualize custom protocols like FIX, Swift, Copybook.
• Handling of multiple responses for messaging protocols like JMS, IBM MQ.

We have yet to implement this tool on a large scale. So far, we have only worked on client demos.

I’m rating it a 7 because it is not a fully evolved virtualization tool compared to other tools offering the same service.

It is a scalable solution, capable of handling ~3,000 TPS. It supports a wide variety of message formats and transports.

• Shift-Left by enabling Build and QA teams to conduct Development Integration/ API / Performance / System Integration Testing
• Remove wait times for constrained services and speed delivery
• Reduce infrastructure costs
• Eliminate expenses from dev/test access to third-party services
• Reduce downtime risk

As a design partner, our company has been working closely with HPE SV R&D and identified a number of improvements and enhancement recommendations that have been incorporated into HP SV releases.

I have used this solution for three years.

We have not encountered stability issues with the newer versions.

I have not encountered any issues with scalability.

Overall, technical support is good, but sometimes due to the complexity of the request, the support gets delayed and transferred to R&D late in the process.

Initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to implement.

We evaluated CA LISA, Parasoft, and IBM GreenHat before choosing this product.

Work together with the Dev and Test teams. Understand what your needs are before you virtualize everything. There’s no benefit to virtualize everything: Analyze, design the solutions, and then start virtualizing.

Service Virtualization cuts down dependency across dev as well as any third party components. We have saved a lot of round-trip time going back and forth trying to look for environments, trying to look for APIs that might have not even been built, so we already understand what the requirement is trying to build our own simulate and API and try to integrate them.

A lot of technology, a lot of Microsoft services, a lot of support to the functionality aspect of it - they need to mature a lot.

They need to catch-up, as for about four years they did not invest a lot of money on newer toolsets, adapting newer technologies, etc. There have been a bunch of companies that evolved during that time, like CA products and the Parasoft suite of products. These guys have already matured, so now HP is trying to play catch-up. They need to mature and move forward. The technology is always evolving, so they need to move towards that.

It's scalable.

I've not had to contact tech support.

Service Virtualization, again it's a brand new concept, but we already had Parasoft. Now we are trying to gauge the synergy between the product lines which is good.

It's pretty straightforward as long as you know how the tool is designed to work and the architecture behind how you need to implement it for your environment.

They are playing a catch-up game.

Service Virtualization is key. If a customer of ours is using applications that uses web services, we don't want to have them shell out a lot of extra money for pay-as-you go web services, or try to struggle with web services that aren't always available. That's where Service Virtualization comes in. They can create their own virtualized web services and not need to go to that outside vendor.

I think the biggest issues that I've seen, and this is a personal view of mine, is that most of the HPE products have a common look and feel to them. I'd really like to see it be a little more customizable to a use and user standpoint. For example. I happen to be colors blind, so I'd like to see more vivid colors on the UI, and things like that. It would make it a little more flexible from the customer standpoint.

I was formally an HP employee, so I've used the HP products in the past. I also was a former Mercury Interactive employee who was acquired by HP.

It's been extremely scalable as far as the testing that we've done with our customers. They've all been really satisfied with the scalability of the HPE products.

I haven't used Service Virtualization in the last two or three months but prior to that I was involved with R&D as well, and they were extremely helpful.

It's a much more cost efficient approach to server deployment. Not as much hardware is being used now.

Our next project is to move to the Cloud where a lot of the services will have to be re-learned with more innovation. It's got to be more scalable, but we won't be scaling it ourselves. It'll be more user defined. There won't be as many silos as there are now. It looks like some of the stuff being introduced at the show [Discover 16] will help us augment that, I'm waiting to learn more.

It's very stable.

It's very scalable.

I've never had to contact them.

We actually use VMware on an HP Blade platform. We looked at other hardware platforms, but we chose HP because of the way that they gave us the best price. Their customer support seems to be really well responsive when we call.

There was a learning curve, but that was several years ago, almost eight or nine years ago when we set initially. It was a learning curve for my infrastructure team. They were used to doing physical hardware deployments on an app server instead of virtualization of the server. Once they got behind them and the technology started running, we have virtualized 99% of all our data centers worldwide.

I believe in the products that we're using. Don't look at it from an application standpoint. Don't let your users try to run with it. You set it up, you give them the guidelines and then let them run with it.

• Being able to look at my entire infrastructure from a hardware standpoint, load on top of it, and virtualize the entire infrastructure.
• Manage it with a single pane of glass.

The concept's almost identical on that topic with respect to the old methodologies or legacy practices. You go in and actually install bare metal machines, put a virtualization engine on top of it, and try to do a P2V move. Where today with the new infrastructure, with basically the new HPE 380 or the similar models of HPE solutions, we're able to virtualize a customer's environments in minutes, not hours and days. That's been able to reduce our services cost and improve our customer retention, as well as the customer end-user experience. We've been able to take their environment and bring it online, and then virtualize the environment very fast.

Pricing is always a concern for our clients, so my guess is if anything can be beat it's price. It's knocking the price down to compete with the white-box vendors out there. If we were able to compete in any other area it would to compete in that space.

With the new models of HPE 380 and similar models that HP's released, firmware upgrades, software upgrades on side the end-user experience with the virtualization engines has become a lot easier. The amount of time and effort for engineers to actually go and deploy those new drivers' software and firmware have been reduced from days/weeks to hours, making it far easier for any end-user to actually go and deploy a firmware update on their hardware infrastructure, without having to do an enormous amount of mitigating testing.

I don't have any problems with it. From a bare metal standpoint, we used to simply just throw in another pizza box. I know the HPE 380 is able to scale out our solutions fast and easy.

I have seen level 1 support has been decent over the last year. I'd rate them 3/5, but as you work your way up into the higher level support environment you can see that the technologists have been in the industry for a while and they've been able to resolve the problems faster, so when we get to the level 2s and the level 3 technologists, the problems really get mitigated quickly, and customer satisfaction is positive. So I'll rate them at a 4.5/5.

Straightforward for the most part. There are limitations. For example in the virtualization engine of the J80, the Instant On, which is a OneView Instant On product line. It does work great, as long as you have your infrastructure. Our clients give us all the necessary requirements, such as the AD and IP address, the DNS, the subnets and stuff. As long as all that works seamlessly, then we can usually bind that HP 380, the Instant On into the infrastructure seamlessly. Does it always work smooth? No. But that's not necessarily HP's fault, it's because the infrastructure doesn't always lend itself to easy integration.

As HPE is making lead way with the HPE 380, coming up with a single pane of glass to automate VMware. Today the back hall is VMware seeing over virtualization. I have to say I am immensely interested in watching how Docker and HPE's adoption of Docker disrupts the virtualization environment, and I'll be honest with you, I cannot wait until they come out with a single pane of glass that allows me to deploy virtual machines using Docker.

That's really going to be a game changer in the industry and reduce our costs, because it's going to give more competition to one of the largest leading virtualization engines on the planet, VMware. It's a good product now. If they don't keep moving forward with it, ingesting like Docker like I mentioned. If they don't keep looking forward to that, then it's going to quickly wane. And over the next 2 years, I see that thing coming to a head that it needs to incorporate Docker into its solution of the product. Without that being incorporated, it's going to lose its cutting edge and the competition is going to come right in behind it.

High level it. You wanna choose a hardware? Choose the hardware from a virtualization engine standpoint that has proven to be number one in the world, you want to choose a server that actually stands the test of time. What I mean by that statement is, we choose HPE servers because they're rock solid. We never have failures with them. But when we do have a problem, which is rare, case in point we had a firmware issue on a driver that HPE took on, went right up to level 3, and the engineering time was able to remediate our business impact within 24 hours. Able to give us a driver permanent fix in two weeks time. There's not a lot of vendors that are willing to go above and beyond like that. So I will say that I'm very pleased with our choice of the hardware.

Most importantly for us, it integrates well with other products and we're able to get great support from partners and from HP.

Everyone needs test environments, dead environments, environments for performance testing, a stage environment, etc. We can build them, but they're expensive. With Service Virtualization, it's much less expensive and we can turn them off and on when we need to.

The latest release of Service Virtualization had a great improvement to the management interface. However, there are still a few things missing.

For example, it's missing a feature to view multiple pages of the different projects that have virtualized services. It still requires us to go only one page at a time, and sometimes we virtualize thousands of services. So there should be a feature to allow a choice to view 20 or 50 projects at a time.

Another missing feature is the ability to select all or turn off all listed projects simultaneously. Right now, if we want to see just one project, we have to uncheck the boxes for 19 of them. Being able to "turn off all" or "turn on 1" would be a nice feature.

Finally, we initially only had the need to be able to do SOAP and REST services as well as some JBBC databases. However, we now need support for some Oracle products, which the solution doesn't have right now. HP added support for SAP recently, and we'd like to see the same for Oracle.

It deploys well without issues.

The stability seems to be very solid. Our boxes are idle, oversized, and don't have memory leaks. When they're in use, they're very stable without any performance of memory spikes.

Early on though, we saw some stability issues with the design that would occasionally crash. If we used it for six straight hours with many projects open, it had stability issues. But the design has been improved and the current version seems very stable, both on the server and design side.

We threw tens of thousands of requests per hour at it, totaling hundreds of thousands of requests, but the box seems as if it were just idle as it handled the load. It scales very well.

We plan on virtualizing significantly more things in the next three to six months. We don't feel the need to have to change hardware, buy additional licenses, or add more servers. We feel we're ready to go for quite a while.

Service Virtualization support is great, and I'd rate each tech support specialist highly. It's better than support for, say, LoadRunner, ALM or UFT. Service Virtualization tech support seems to have good logging so they can track what I've done in response to issues. They can see patterns and issues.

This is an important product in both the production and test environments.

With this solution, you don't have to use your production services for implementing other software uses. It saves us time, effort, manpower, and cost, in particular.

Other solutions have more functionalities.

It could needs to be a lot more scalable.

The main thing for us is that it does what we need it to do. There are many other product out there in the marketplace that will claim huge feature sets, but at the end of the day, you're actually looking for a product that just does what you need it to do.

Specifically, it's easy to set up and to get all your instructions from the HP website. You don't have to go through these horrible pre-sales and marketing pitches to get access.

I think a big thing for us is a tighter market and a reduction of wastage. We have a number of end points in the environment that are not terribly reliable. If they failed, then we could end up with tens of hundreds of people suddenly not being able to test or validate.

With Service Virtualization, we can replace them with something that is much more stable. We also get view commonality, so rather than developers and test groups creating their own mocks of environments, they'll have one project service with a tool set that does the same thing.

Also, we've got a high level of compliance now with everyone using the same tool. The downside is, if it's wrong, it's wrong for everybody. The upside is that everybody's testing against the same thing so we have a degree of commonality. When all these developers are doing the unit tests, once we get to the multiple test environment, we're unlikely to see a different problems caused by different issues.

One of the key components of the tool for us is the ability to write scripted rules in JavaScript or C#. As it stands now, the debugging capacity within the tool is fairly limited. I think some formal integration with an external ID that measures videotaping, like eClerx, would be nice in a future release.

There have been no issues with deployment.

In the four months we've used it, I've had no stability issues with very good load on the platform.

We're early in the journey, but so far no issues with scalability.

We've had a relationship now with the R&D team and that's been instrumental for us in making the decision to buy the product, and their involvement in addressing issues. The reality is that we have a legacy IT infrastructure and it's not going to change. The virtualization tool hadn't quite met our needs and they have been very responsive in fixes and patches.

I think the beauty of being able to order the 30 day trial from the HP website means that you can actually get in there and look, unfettered by the sales and marketing people, and actually understand what the product does for you and your organization.