OpenText Service Virtualization Reviews

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.

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.

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.