OpenText Service Virtualization Reviews

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.

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.

The whole service virtualization concept works on integration patterns, so the service virtualization should be supporting the regular RESTful services. However, it should also support services that listen and reply to MQs, generic JMS, SAP WebMethods integration server, universal messaging, or SAP virtualization database (or whatever virtualization you have, e.g., Java virtualization).

The support for these integration patterns and the ease of use to wizard-based utility is what I would consider the most important features for service virtualization platforms.

It has improve our organization a lot. For example, one of our very recent client's implementations that our Patson USA team did, we saved more than $15 million. This is in confirmed savings. In the past three and a half years of our implementation there, it helps you avoid the environment, get your software to production a lot faster, and reduces the wait times. That means it improves the productivity of your pre-production community. It also helps you in finding defects earlier if you can shift your testing left and integrate your application under test with virtual services.

With service virtualization, I'd love to see support for the Internet of things. I would love to see a web portal that the developers can use without consuming the virtual service designer license. This portal would be a lightweight utility where developers can put their own request response parameters for an already-created virtual service. This would really help in the DevOps culture.

More support for different protocols. I would love to see more wizards rather than relying on some custom coding, which you can use C# as well as Visual Basic scripting. In the service virtualization platform, I would love to see more wizard features as well as the ability to connect to an external database, which by the way, we have put an enhancement request in for. I'd love to see that in the service virtualization platform.

The service virtualization tool is perhaps one of the newest tools compared to its competitors, but it also means it has a very high degree of energy in it. From our experience, we have put more than 20 enhancement requests for the service virtualization platform and to the Micro Focus R&D team, based in Prague in the Czech Republic, who has been very approachable. They have taken our suggestions and they have actually implemented our enhancement requests, which is very nice to know.

The tool by itself is scalable. It does not have load-balancing capabilities, but the competitors don't either. I don't know if you really need to have that kind of capability, although that is one of the enhancement requests that we have been talking to Micro Focus about, and we'll continue to go down that path.

The tool is scalable. For example, we have about 60 or so services deployed to one single license of Micro Focus at any given time, of Micro Focus service virtualization. I would rate the stability and the scalability high up there.

Most of our tickets go to Micro Focus R&D. On the support side, I would say because service virtualization is newer compared to LoadRunner, most of our tickets get routed to R&D, as opposed to the LoadRunner, where most of the tickets get resolved at the first layer of support.

I was involved in the initial setup, and not just the software set up, but I was also involved in getting the right hardware configuration for that kind of workload. Our Patson USA team worked closely with HPE R&D (now Micro Focus R&D) to even figure out the CPU processor speed that would be needed to support 3,000 transactions per second, and HPE helped us out with that.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It is complex, but it is straightforward if you know what you're doing. There are various different ways you can set up the tool and that's where the complexity is. But, if you just want to do the traditional setup, it's very easy to do.

I was heavily involved with our Patson USA team when they were tasked with choosing the right platform for our clients and we evaluated all the competitors. We evaluated Cecilia, Parasoft, as well as IBM Green Hat, the Micro Focus service virtualization tool, and an open source, at that time, SmartBear also had service virtualization capability (I believe they do now, as well). We evaluated all of that. We put about 1500 criteria of what are we looking for in a service virtualization platform. We consulted with entire enterprise architecture teams. Many different teams collaborated with them and came up with that 1500 criteria, and this is how we were heavily involved in that decision-making.

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.

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.

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.