Optimizing Infrastructure for Software Testing Using Virtualization

Virtualization technology and cloud computing have brought a paradigm shift in the way we utilize, deploy and manage computer resources. They allow fast deployment of multiple operating system as containers on physical machines which can be either discarded after use or check- pointed for later re-deployment. At European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), we have been using virtualization technology to quickly setup virtual machines for our developers with preconfigured software to enable them to quickly test/deploy a new version of a software patch for a given application. This paper reports both on the techniques that have been used to setup a private cloud on a commodity hardware and also presents the optimization techniques we used to remove deployment specific performance bottlenecks.