OpenText Service Virtualization Reviews

REST and SOAP virtualization; we are a very heavy service-oriented company and very reliant on third-party services. Having the ability to test independently without development delay for integration has been very critical for our ability to deliver.

Teams have reduced the amount of delayed development effort it takes to roll out a new product by leveraging a virtual service for development and then meeting up for a final integration test when it is complete. The tool has been highly useful for edge case and negative test case efforts by QA as well as useful for high-volume levels of performance testing against third-party endpoints.

The data-driven model is painful at best. The usage of Excel can be cumbersome for larger services being virtualized. Having an SQL-based implementation would be far more usable. Also, the requirement of an SQL Server database for each individual user of the Designer tool is overkill. A shared schema would be better.

I have used it for two years.

No deployment or stability issues, and the tool scales fantastically.

I use a reseller for my support needs; it’s been fantastic when needed.

Initial setup was extremely easy; just a typical Windows installation wizard and it took me no time to get this deployed.

I implemented this tool myself. Go download it from the HPE website and try it out; it’s easy!

The Enterprise Server gives us what we need for performance testing. I think one Designer license is sufficient with the introduction of the Community Designer license now. Identifying ROI for this tool has been a challenge for us to prove out still.

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.

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 main thing for us is that it does what we need it to do. There are many other product out there in the marketplace that will claim huge feature sets, but at the end of the day, you're actually looking for a product that just does what you need it to do.

Specifically, it's easy to set up and to get all your instructions from the HP website. You don't have to go through these horrible pre-sales and marketing pitches to get access.

I think a big thing for us is a tighter market and a reduction of wastage. We have a number of end points in the environment that are not terribly reliable. If they failed, then we could end up with tens of hundreds of people suddenly not being able to test or validate.

With Service Virtualization, we can replace them with something that is much more stable. We also get view commonality, so rather than developers and test groups creating their own mocks of environments, they'll have one project service with a tool set that does the same thing.

Also, we've got a high level of compliance now with everyone using the same tool. The downside is, if it's wrong, it's wrong for everybody. The upside is that everybody's testing against the same thing so we have a degree of commonality. When all these developers are doing the unit tests, once we get to the multiple test environment, we're unlikely to see a different problems caused by different issues.

One of the key components of the tool for us is the ability to write scripted rules in JavaScript or C#. As it stands now, the debugging capacity within the tool is fairly limited. I think some formal integration with an external ID that measures videotaping, like eClerx, would be nice in a future release.

There have been no issues with deployment.

In the four months we've used it, I've had no stability issues with very good load on the platform.

We're early in the journey, but so far no issues with scalability.

We've had a relationship now with the R&D team and that's been instrumental for us in making the decision to buy the product, and their involvement in addressing issues. The reality is that we have a legacy IT infrastructure and it's not going to change. The virtualization tool hadn't quite met our needs and they have been very responsive in fixes and patches.

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.

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.

• HPE Service Virtualization Designer
• Virtual services learning and recording data: We can keep virtual services in learn mode, simulate mode, etc., which is very good and everything is automatic. One can view the requests learned and change simulated data.
• HPE Service Virtualization portal: There’s a similar feature in portal where we can park services in different modes.
• Deploy and undeploy with a single click is an awesome feature.

Performance testing and infrastructure costs were reduced because of virtual services.

Dependency on other teams was reduced, where we are expecting live services from them and they are not available. We can create virtual services in a few minutes with a few clicks using mocked data. This is awesome.

There were minor version compatibility issues between HPSV project files while importing to the workspace, but these have already been addressed in recent versions. And same with stability.

I used it for 1.3 years.

Sometimes it stops working after switching remote and local servers.

Initial setup was simple and straightforward.

When you are living with a lot of web services, it's worth having this product.

We moved recently from HPE Service Virtualization to Parasoft.