Can it also cook breakfast?

SAP and VMware announce a virtualization pact, and Larry Dignan asks if this makes ERP implementations easier. Not much. Likely help in server performance(and therefore data center and hosting costs), but not much in implementation labor savings.

Sizing and provisioning and administering hardware is a very small part of labor in an SAP implementation. Process design, table configuration, data conversion, integration, end-user training, testing, change management - are the big bad boys.

If VMware can help in those areas I need to go buy stock in the company...high as it already is. And short the systems integrators.

Comments

Hi Vinnie,

VMWare actually does help with testing. Quite often a big part of the elapsed time to do testing is spent setting up test environments and resolving issues with their configuration. VMs when implemented well definitely help to cut down the time for this. It would be interesting to see what impact this can have on effort rather than timescales or quality, where the improvement is the most visible ones.

Possibly the same thing applies for training environments which can be equally volatile.

Regards
Jiri

[vinnie mirchandani]

good point, would be interesting to see where it reduces effort - acceptance, unit, regression, stress etc

[Jiri Ludvik]

Good question.

I think the savings will be mostly in the phases where you test correctness of the operations of the whole solution. I'd guess this will mean integration testing and performance / stress testing.

[Jiri]

Forgot to add - Even though the use of VM makes improvement to test it is not going to be radical improvement. I would personally expect more from a combination of VM, technology to manage virtual environments and test automation. That should allow earlier and more frequent testing (unit & integration) including quicker update of environments. But I guess we are still in early days on this one.

[jorad]

Vinnie and Jiri,

Have a look at our blog 'Virtualization for SAP Solutions' at http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/SAPsolutions , where we are commenting on some of the questions. And as an aside, there do exist integrations of VMware technology (Lab Manager) with test management tools!

[vinnie mirchandani]

Jorad, thanks...your blog does not appear to allow comments...