RQM Lab Management features
I am trying to determine what the best set-up of the features in RQM Lab Management would be for us.
We are looking for an environment management tool which will enable us to easily control and track reservations on our build, test, and production environments. This is an application support contract, so with the exception of prod environments most are used for preparing releases and upgrades. Some environments may be made up of multiple machines although most will be a single instance, and generally speaking every application will have each environment (dev, UAT, pre-prod, prod, etc.).
I am seeing a number of options which might be the right sort of thing ("Lab Resources", "Test Environments", "Test Cells"), but I'm not sure how they fit together and would best be used in our case. I had assumed a Test Environment comprising Machines for each environment would be best, but when submitting a request it appears to usually be for a specific Machine, and we would want the requester to be able to request an environment rather than a specific machine. Perhaps the best solution is to create a Machine per environment, and group them to make the Test Environment the application? So for example the "Maximo" Test Environment would have a Maximo UAT machine, a Maximo pre-prod machine, etc.
I am sorry to bother you with it - I could probably figure this out if I had a few more hours to devote to playing around with it, but I am running low on time and hoping that someone familiar with it is able to simply say "oh yes, for that you'll want to set it up this way..."!
Many thanks,
We are looking for an environment management tool which will enable us to easily control and track reservations on our build, test, and production environments. This is an application support contract, so with the exception of prod environments most are used for preparing releases and upgrades. Some environments may be made up of multiple machines although most will be a single instance, and generally speaking every application will have each environment (dev, UAT, pre-prod, prod, etc.).
I am seeing a number of options which might be the right sort of thing ("Lab Resources", "Test Environments", "Test Cells"), but I'm not sure how they fit together and would best be used in our case. I had assumed a Test Environment comprising Machines for each environment would be best, but when submitting a request it appears to usually be for a specific Machine, and we would want the requester to be able to request an environment rather than a specific machine. Perhaps the best solution is to create a Machine per environment, and group them to make the Test Environment the application? So for example the "Maximo" Test Environment would have a Maximo UAT machine, a Maximo pre-prod machine, etc.
I am sorry to bother you with it - I could probably figure this out if I had a few more hours to devote to playing around with it, but I am running low on time and hoping that someone familiar with it is able to simply say "oh yes, for that you'll want to set it up this way..."!
Many thanks,
One answer
A Test Environment is a description of one or more machines. Lab Resources are individual machines. Lab Resources can be physical or virtual machines that can be used for testing, reserved, and so on. Test Cells are collections of Lab Resources ( machines ). You can associate a test cell with a test environment, and then automatically find appropriate machines based on the descriptions of the machines in the test environment.
When you request a machine using a description (test environment) the lab manager matches the description with the appropriate lab resources and can fulfill the request by reserving the lab resources. There is also the capability to directly reserve machines, assuming the user has permissions
I hope this helps,
Frank McGrath
RQM Development