OpenText Service Virtualization Reviews

• 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.

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.