Because of the price, Micro Focus Service Virtualization is not for everyone. For large companies with specific use cases, this solution may be the best way to go.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this solution at seven.

They are playing a catch-up game.

The advice I would give to a client who is looking into purchase Micro Focus Virtualization would be that they have to know the clear benefits they will get and the concept of service virtualization. They have to know what shall be the replacement on which situations and the practice to do it. Also, they should to conduct a feasibility study and evaluate the ROI in a particular area. Then if they are clear on the purpose, do a proof of concept. If all are done, we suggested going ahead with the purchasing. The implementation is quite easy and updating is simple. 

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as an eight out of ten.

Service Virtualization is one of the great tool sets coming into the market. It's really going to change the industry.

In order to release my product on schedule, the development and testing time becomes one of the major challenges, although it is not only challenge.

Other challenges include dependency and time consumption. On the other hand, the industry is dealing with a big shift in transformation from legacy to brownfield, and from brownfield to greenfield. We have a separate greenfield layout going on.

When I have a tough integration, a very complex integration system, and when I'm going to roll out my product quickly, I'm looking at concepts like DevOps and Agile, where time to market is going to be much less.

I have to expedite my testing and development. To do that expedition, I have to make sure my pre-production staging integration environments are fully ready. If they are not ready, I'm unable to achieve my desired goal.

It plays a very vital role in this whole cycle, where you can really create a Service Virtualization asset. An asset may be your environment, a web service, or even a single call. We create that asset and we reduce the dependency.

As an example, if I want to virtualize my Telco system, I need payment and billing gateway services. I also need some sort of verification services from the third party vendor. So, rather than building an environment, I will create a Service Virtualization payment asset such as a Visa.

I then use this Visa environment for the billing system, so I can create an asset. I can recall that asset as many times as I want to in my different testing scenarios.

Some of the criteria I looked at while looking to purchase one of these service virtualization tools was ease of use because I’m gonna have to give it to my org, the QA team owns it, not the developers. The developers, the whole shift left idea for development works partially but they are so slammed to meet tight deadlines that I can’t throw another tool on them. On the other note I don’t have on my team, I have QA analysts so they’re not all completely technical, they dabble a little on it. So I wanted something that they could pretty much do a drag and drop into it. I wanted something that would be easy to discuss with my ops teams to let them understand what I needed deployed to be successful in the environment. I was blown away with how fast the implementation was. I took the demo off the website, deployed it, ran with engineering team, probably spent maybe half a day getting everything I needed stood up, and then shortly thereafter we just all right we’re gonna buy this ‘cause it’s working fantastic. Bought the license, dumped it right on top of it and it still kept going, I mean it was no problem. So ease of use you know the ability to quickly stand something up, you know. When I mean quickly I mean someone’s calling me on the phone saying I’m blocked, I need this. The ability to stand up and test immediately is huge.

Rating - I’d probably put it closer to six or seven because it’s still maturing to be honest, just to be out there about it. I know that they went through a major change between I think the 2.0 release into this 3.0 release. I didn’t buy it prior to that but I’ve been reading up on it. Stability’s been all right, the implementation needs a little assistance like I talked about. I would probably say ease of use really puts my number up. When I was grading it between the other ones that was top notch for me was the ease of use. I’d like to see maybe some more documentation around API’s that are available to it so I don’t have to use other HP tools to integrate with it because I don’t have a whole suite of HP tools at my company. So like your automation for example is not UFT, it’s ran through homegrown automation solutions. So I would-I know the rest API available but it’s not documented and I know was that I can extract that information but I don’t want to do it that way ‘cause that’s a lot of work on my part. So I’ve talked to-talked to their solution architects and they said that yeah, this will become available just hold on, we’re baking it out. So I’m a little impatient I guess. I want-you know, moving into like a dev ops world you kind of want to get away from a lot of manual clicks and make it fully automated as much as possible, and that’s one of the components for me to make it automated.

So when evaluating these tools make sure that it works for the infrastructure that you have. I talked to a former colleague that was researching tools out there. He had alreadypurchased Greenhead, IBM Greenhead, only to find out that he inherited it and he found out that he couldn’t do anything with MQ series. Which that was a pretty big blow for him because he really needed MQ series out. So make sure that your technologies are definitely supported by the tool. Do a very thorough proof of concept on it. I said it was really easy to set up and it was. It was fantastic, but we ran it through different scenarios. I brought out some technical specialist not from HP but my reseller to sit there and show us how it works with TIBCO EMS, how it works with you know WCS services. How is it-how does it work with rest? Do a full soup du jour on it in our environment. That’s probably the biggest thing I would say is, don’t do it on the canned services or websites that always work in demo mode, do it on your stuff. If it works on your infrastructure then it’s probably you’re gonna be in good shape.

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.

Seriously, download it and try it. If you can virtualize your services with the tool with limited effort, then it’ll be the right choice for you.

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.

Check the protocols supported in the product.

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

In terms of its support and the technical abilities that it has, there are other tools. I'm not gonna name them, they have a higher degree of technical ability. Unfortunately, their support and their performance are not that great. You want to have a car. You don't want to have a Ferrari that doesn't work. You need to have a car that can get you from point A to point B, and HP service virtualization has been performed there.

Don't give up. It may sound very expensive at the beginning, but we have realized more than $15 million in savings at one of our major healthcare clients. It will really help you. Try working with your management to have them spend the money on getting a service virtualization platform.

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.

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.

The purpose for this tool is very obvious and Micro Focus covers it very well.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

What we looked for to select a solution was ease of use, scalability, cost, and professionalism in terms of the people who do the implementation.

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.