The Cavalry Has Arrived - WSSRA-VE

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Many of the problems in enterprise IT worldwide have a common underlying root causative element - it is way too hard to test and model changes to the production environment BEFORE they are committed.

NO MORE. What if you could model your enterprise IT environment virtually, then do whatever "what-if" tests you needed, then simply wipe/reload, and do it again? Would you improve security through faster patching? Would you speed time to market for your appdev? Would you make better, faster, migration and upgrade decisions?

Check out the WSSRA Virtual Environments for Development and Test, released this week. WSSRA Virtual Environments for Development and Test (WSSRA-VE) is an extension of the WSSRA Implementation Guides, leveragings the power of Virtual Server 2005 and automated deployment and configuration tools to minimize the physical infrastructure and logistical overhead necessary to deploy emulations of various data center services. Like WSSRA itself, the WSSRA-VE is intended to aid users in their own effort to model their operational environment and condense it to a scale that can be representative of the infrastructure integration challenges facing developers and testers of distributed, message-based applications and IT services, and still be inexpensive and relatively economical to build and use throughout a large-scale IT organization.

The WSSRA-VE design has been rigorously tested and proven in a lab environment to provide exceptional planning and implementation guidance that addresses fundamental infrastructure issues such as lab availability, lab-to-production network security, and management of many virtualized environments simultaneously.

WSSRA-VE consists of a single downloadable package:

  • A fully integrated set of guidance, including an introduction document, an architectural blueprint, a planning guide, a build guide, and an operations guide. 
  • A WSSRA-VE Deployment Kit that provides most of the configuration files and supporting documents used to build instances of these virtualized environments. The WSSRA-VE Deployment Kit contains the following:
    • Useful Command files, Windows Script Host and Visual Basic scripts for automating tedious tasks
    • ISA 2004 firewall rules used to produce a software-based firewall similar to specification hardware firewalls used in the original WSSRA
    • Security policies and GPO backup files to set up a WSSRA-compliant domain schema
    • Build Verification Test cases
    • Virtual Machine settings files for each virtual system in a WSSRA-VE instance
    • For detailed information on automated deployment and configuration, Automated Deployment Toolkit (ADT) Manifest files used to build the environments in the lab and guidance on how to read these files
    • Various WinPE extensions to aid in the deployment and configuration of many IT services

Did I mention lately that Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition owners can run up to 4 virtual machines with same OS at no additional costs?

 

Others who downloaded WSSRA Virtual Environments for Development and Test also downloaded:

  1. Windows Server System Reference Architecture (WSSRA)
  2. SQL Server 2005 System Views Map
  3. Visual Studio 2005 Automation Samples
  4. PSS Service Center Labs - 2005
  5. SQL Server 2005 Samples and Sample Databases (December 2005)

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