If you have ever worked for a software company you will know how much of a pain it is to ghost machines for your test labs so that you can get a new release out the door.á Virtualization has made this quite a bit easier for sure, but there is a new product thatáextends this technology to an incredible degree.á Akimbi has a product called Slingshot which manages the deployment, creation and configuration of your virtual test environments.á This technology is called C3R (complex configuration, capture and restore) and allows you to create complex configurations of servers for your testing environments.á What's more, Slingshot provides virtual networking features that allow you to run the same configurations with the same IP address concurrently.á This means you could test two complex scenarios at the same time on the exact same server configurations.á Another important feature allows your tester to save the state of an environment in which a bug was discovered andácheck this saved state into Slingshot. The developer whoáis assigned the bug can then can view the bug in the exact environment in which it occurred and begin to debug it.á Currently Ration integrates directly with Slingshot and I would bet that Team System integration will be coming soon.
There is a webcast on the site which gives a good overview, but you have to register.
http://www.akimbi.com/home/Home.aspx
Happy Coding!