Quick creation of fresh OS install for software testing

Question

What do you recommend for quickly creating images for testing a software product (that needs hardware access - full USB port access)? Does virtualization cover this? I need to be able to quickly re-image the system to test from scratch again, and need good options for Windows and Mac OS.

Answer 1

If virtualization is right for you depends on how much access direct access you actually need.

But if virtualization works then vmware offers products for Windows and Mac that support a Snapshot feature.

Or there's also VirtualBox which works on Linux, Windows and Mac, also supports snapshots and is free.

Answer 2

I've used Virtual PC heavily for this kind of thing in Windows, without ever hitting any issues. It's free, which is always a bonus ;o)

Edit: Just re-read the question - not sure that it has USB support. Should tick all the other boxes though

Answer 3

I use VMWare Player for this sort of stuff. I've not tested it with the sort of access you discuss (since I mostly do apps rather than driver-level stuff) but the advantages are many, specifically being able to copy the VM when it's shut down for later restore to a specific point (sort of a poor man's snapshot) and being able to have lots of configurations without blowing the hardware budget.

It certainly provides USB virtualization and I would say it's the best bet for providing the full device access. I would suggest testing it since, if it provides the hardware support you need, it's a very good solution for the other reasons given. The only other (non-VM) suggestion I can think of which would match it would be hard disk image backups which can be restored at will.

Answer 4

CloneZilla is a great, free way to reimage machines.

Answer 5

Virtualization may work for you as long as it is only USB access.

VirtualBox is available with USB support either for "private use or evaluation" or commercially and works on Win, Mac and Linux. USB support on Linux and Mac is somewhat sporadical though and does not work with all devices. VBox supports snapshots.

VMWare has one free product called VMWare Server for Win and Linux but I'm not sure how far USB support is included in their server products. For Mac there is VMWare Fusion but that's not available for free. Fusion should work with most USB devices. Workstation products for Windows are more expensive. I think there is a trial version for all of them. All do snapshots.

I don't know how far Parallels (Mac) supports USB devices or snapshots.

You don't need snapshot functionality if you can afford some short downtime between re-imaging. You can shut down the VM and then just copy the disk image (which is nothing else but one or multiple regular files) and start the VM again. Snapshots can be reverted to a lot faster (without rebooting).

Answer 6

If virtual machines will work for you, you can choose between Virtual PC, VMWare and VirtualBox.

Virtual PC supports Win host and Win/linux guests. Although there are some caveats with regards to the X resolution support.

VMWare supports Win, OS X and Linux host. It supports Win and Linux guests.

VirtualBox supports same hosts and guests as VMWare.

None of the three supports OS X as guest officially. The reason is that OS X is licensed only for Apple machines. However, there are some hacks that allow installing OS X under VMWare. It might be also possible to install it under VirtualBox or Virtual PC, although I have not seen specific instructions.

If virtualization is not good enough for you, you can use precreated installation images or a disk imaging program.

For precreated installation images for Windows, you can use the sysprep tool (search for sysprep or system preparation tool). I don't know if there are equivalent tools for OS X from Apple.

For disk imaging programs, I know quite a lot people swear by Symantec Ghost. I personally have not used it, so can't give you much info about it. There's also a list of disk imaging programs on Wikipedia, so you evaluate these as well.

Hope that helps.

Answer 7

If you can't just use a virtual machine and take snapshots of the fresh install then do a fresh install onto real hardware and use a disk imaging tool (Ghost comes to mind).

If cost is a factor then there's a few Linux live CDs that will do what you want. This comes to mind. Put a second disk in the machine and image from the second disk unless you have fast networks and network storage; it's way to slow to go to and from the network regularly. If you're using a Linux live CD then you can actually set the second disk to EXT3 so Windows won't detect it and assign a drive letter too.

Answer 8

Once I worked for some company where we needed to test our software for various combinations of versions of OS, SPs and some other libraries which our application was dependent on. For each separate identified combination we had a separate partition image created with the help of Norton Ghost (DOS version). All images were put to a server. Whenever a tester got the next version of the system core to test, they would just methodically restore from all applicable images, install the application, test it and report it.

This approach though a straightforward one would allow full access to the hardware and will provide you with 100% native installation.

Nowadays, I still use this approach for my private PC. I'm sure you can try the latest achievements like Hyper-V. We use it nowadays where I work. When we tried to install Team Foundation Server (the process is far from being easy) we also had to drop the process at some point and just restore a virtual machine from an image because we realized we made a few mistakes during installation. Conceptually the same approach that saves a great deal of time. I'm not really sure though how compatible a virtual PC is in the sense of hardware access.

You can try both approaches.

P.S. Today there are two Ghost products, Symantec Ghost (good old one) for corporate use and Norton Ghost for home use (bloatware in my opinion). If you decide to try this option, I would recommend the Symantec Ghost (part of Ghost Solution Suite).

Answer 9

If you have a dedicated workstation for testing then I would highly recommend Symantec Ghost. Simply get the workstation to the clean state, reboot to ghost and 'take a snapshot' of the HD or partition. You can then replace the HD or partition from the image say from CD or multicasted over a network connection from another PC.

I have used it for years now, even to the point of automating the build of 60 test workstations (at the same time).