Hyper-V

Friday I, and a couple of colleagues, will be manning a Tech Fest booth involving utilizing virtual machines to increase testing productivity. Our proposal includes four major areas: 1) adding virtual machine infrastructure to the test lab to parallelize test execution, 2) running virtual lab machines on office workstations when not in use to further increase lab resources, 3) utilizing virtual machines to pre-test an environment before committing to a full lab run and 4) taking advantage of Hyper-V snapshot technology to capture a repro environment (pre-snapshot) and post-mortem environment (post-snapshot) of any failing tests.

For those of you who don't know, Hyper-V is Microsoft's hypervisor successor to Virtual Server. It's faster, enables 64bit virtual machines and other advanced functionality.