How to create a test environment for commercial Windows applications?

Question

How do you best test commercial windows .NET applications on different environments? (XP, Vista, Win 7, Terminal server, Citrix)

I was thinking of MS Virtual PC, together with some ghosting software like Acronis .. http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/

What are good, tested test setups ? :-)

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Thanks to the help of volodi and lukas I've now come a bit further: It seems like VMWare Workstation is the perfect software solution for this problem. You can take snapshots of configurations, so we don't even need any imaging software anymore. Plus, it has a price of 189 $... sweet ...

Now a few extra problems however we encountered :

• In vmware, it is recommended you store your vm's on your LOCAL disk. Saving to a network or USB drive is possible, but you need PocketACE, and you'll have to store it first locally, then convert which seems cumbersome ... So we are thinking of buying a new laptop with 1TB Disk space. We would use this laptop solely for testing purposes. Where do you store your virtual machines ?

-> Store it on a network drive or local disk... this was a misunderstanding ...

• Now another problem seems backing up ... How you're gonna backup 500 GB of data ? That seems like a lot of work ...

-> Well this was a misunderstanding. If you create a new machine, you have to allocate 40GB of space. So we thought, we need 8 machines, 8 x 40 = 320 GB ... This is wrong, a vm is +/- 3-6 GB ... The vm disk size seems to grow dynamically

• Also, should i buy a 64-bit machine ?

-> If you want to testCitrix XenServer, you will need a 64-bit processor ...

Answer 1

I am using VMWare, I liked linked clone feature that creates a temporary clone of certain configuration. VMWare supports more OSes. You can check "Comparison of platform virtual machines"

Answer 2

This question is better suited to ServerFault rather than SO... but we use VMWare ESXi here with a bunch of VMs, snapshots, various configurations, different versions of Citrix, Terminal Services, multiple test domains, Active Directory deployment testing, etc. etc.

Basically while you can use some desktop software like Virtual PC, you'll run into problems pretty quickly with resources. Better off to setup a server running ESX or Hyper-V, if you need to test compatibility with App-V and/or XenDesktop then you'll need a Hyper-V server running. For everything else we find that the free version of ESXi is more than sufficient.

Take care however to allocate plenty of resources, we've got around 30 VMs for testing and 10-15 may be running at any one time - with only 12Gb of memory and running VMs such as 2008 R2 (2Gb RAM recommended) it's pretty easy to max that out and slow everything else down.

Answer 3

Here are a few tips:

• Use Virtual Machine, there are some freeware as well, like VirtualBox or VMware Player
• Install all OS you need (WinXP, Win7, WinVista, etc.), you can use trial versions, it's not a problem.
• Deploy your application on all of them, better use debug mode and logging as well.
• Test your application, if it works same on all of them (OS).