Analyzing the application foreground of Microsoft Development Test Cloud

Cloud computing provides an unprecedented opportunity for the information technology industry, and not only that, as the hottest and most admired technology, it can help businesses and organizations improve business agility, reduce management complexity and control costs, and maximize ROI.

And Microsoft itself is the leading practitioner of cloud computing technology, as a leading cloud computing service provider and an IT enterprise with large affiliates around the world , as Microsoft Global Chief Information officer Tony Scott said, As the first company to use cloud computing technology to solve and do very well, it is moving the huge and complex information system to the cloud computing platform gradually. After adopting the Microsoft Private Cloud infrastructure, STB China successfully built a test cloud platform and self-service portal in its research and development Engineering Laboratory, and emerged as a model for other software development teams to build on its own development of cloud computing applications. at the same time is part of Microsoft Asia Pacific Research Group's server and Development tools Division of the Chinese Team (hereinafter referred to as STB China) is one such "internal customers."

SAP, the technology leader for global enterprise management software and solutions, is also impressed by the development Engineering Lab, which has only three engineers managing 1,500 physical servers. Zeng, director of SAP Businessone Global testing, said after a visit that "the efficient operation of the STB development Test cloud truly demonstrates the concept of delivering it in a service way, achieving the value of reducing IT costs, flexible resource development, and concentration of business." ”

Dr. Shing, director of the Computer Network center of Zhongshan Hospital affiliated to Fudan University, said: "The greatest value of Microsoft's development test cloud is that it answers users ' concerns with four years of vivid practice and detailed data: Do small businesses need private cloud?" How high is the funding and technology threshold for deploying a private cloud? How much is the benefit after realization? In this case, we can see that private cloud is a real reality for local SMEs. Shortly after visiting the laboratory, Zhongshan Hospital also consulted the model of the lab, and with the support of Microsoft technical team, began to build a private cloud in the courtyard.

Four pain points hinder business development

STB China, which started in early 2005, established its vision of becoming the world's leading development, innovation and business hub, helping the server and Development tools Division succeed in the Global and Chinese worlds. As the core Department of Microsoft Asia Pacific Research and Development Group, the China Research and development team of the Server and Development Tools Division currently has nearly 400 developers in both Shanghai and Beijing, actively participating in SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, Windows Sgt Global development and innovation of Microsoft core platform products such as Business server, Windows HPC server, etc.

From the beginning of 2005 to 2007, with the expansion of the business and the scope of growth, the number of servers in STB to increase to more than 800 units, but in the number of business growth and server management tasks increased, its responsibility and the huge maintenance work is still composed of three engineers of the Research and Development Engineering Laboratory team responsible It also needs to build and maintain the product testing environment for more than 10 product groups. Like all fast-growing organizations, STB is plagued by a lack of strategic planning for IT infrastructure.

"There are four of the most representative sore spots, and I think this is a typical problem for other similar organizations or businesses," he said. "Feng, director of business operations at STB, has a deep understanding of this:" The number of servers grows too fast, but the utilization of a single server is low, hardware lacks unified management and maintenance, server resources are decentralized, inefficient management is scarce, and the lack of efficient information sharing among product groups has nearly plagued us for nearly a year, with four major challenges. This is to a large extent hinder the entire team while maintaining the rapid development of the business, efficient and high-quality delivery of the core projects on time to develop test tasks. “

Clear objectives and efficient execution to ensure successful business process improvement

Admittedly, Microsoft STB is itself an excellent developer of enterprise cloud computing products, and has developed clear ideas and goals for the same level of product development as it does with the use of corporate cloud technology to improve the application of business processes. Feng and his team are well aware that they need to "improve the infrastructure of the entire research and development engineering lab to tap the potential of existing server resources, improve resource utilization, compress service cycles, and improve customer satisfaction." ”

As one of the "earliest and best customers" of Microsoft's cloud computing technology, STB's goal is very clear: based on Microsoft's proprietary cloud platform, a comprehensive virtualization technology is built to build a fully functional development test cloud base environment that meets the development and testing tasks of each product group. STB's Research and Development Engineering Laboratory combines team product development characteristics with Microsoft products, and takes a step-by-step approach to optimize and improve the entire lab infrastructure and steadily drive and eventually build a complete private cloud infrastructure without impacting current research and development testing progress.

The solutions adopted by STB are divided into four areas: 1. The introduction of Hyper-V-based server virtualization to build a private cloud infrastructure; 2. Improve the development of testing cloud solutions, optimize the allocation of resources; 3. Use Self-Service portal to shorten service time; 4. Build resource pool, realize centralized resource management, realize green it.

Microsoft Development Test Cloud Core Component architecture diagram

According to Feng, STB's current Microsoft Private cloud solution involves a wide range of product technologies, including Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2,system Center Twist Manager 2007 R2, Windows Storage Server 2008 r2,visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and SharePoint 2007 R2, and so on. "The benefits are also very clear," Feng said, "and we have successfully built our own development test cloud platform and self-service portal with Microsoft's technical advantage in infrastructure, services and software as services." This independent innovation development of the cloud platform, help us to successfully integrate, centralize, expand all kinds of development test resources, standardize services and platforms, improve team collaboration and develop test efficiencies, including providing automated building services to developers, improving product productivity by at least 30% per day, and achieving sustainable green it goals. “

Feng lists several numbers that reflect, to some extent, the value that Microsoft's private cloud technology brings to software companies:
After the application development test cloud, the team average hardware utilization increased from 25% to more than 50%, at the same time through real-time monitoring of physical resource utilization, when the physical resource utilization reached the established degree, then purchase new hardware equipment, truly make every investment is value for money.

At the beginning of 2010, STB had more than 1,500 physical servers, 371 of which were used as virtual machine hosts and ran 4,596 virtual machines on its base, and in normal condition, more than 2,300 virtual machines were running; on these 371 servers, There are also 800 VHD libraries that provide strong support for the automated deployment of Windows systems for development and test product groups throughout the team.

The Self-Service portal provides a way for STB to manage server requirements, allowing engineers to centrally manage physical resources, including CPU count, memory, hard disk space, network VLANs, and so on, simplifying resource management processes, from lab engineers to product group development and test engineers, The average time spent on building a test environment was reduced by 70%.

STB China through the virtualization and other series of measures, the whole year 2010 reduced emissions of more than 9,000 tons of carbon dioxide, saving 14, 850,000-kilowatt of the electricity, with the Chinese households per household consumption of 2,500 kwh, the above energy savings for 5,941 households in China for one year.

According to Microsoft Greater China Vice President and Marketing strategy Department general manager Sun Jiandong, at present, there are many software companies, government organizations, software parks in the use of Microsoft solutions to build development test cloud platform, self-service cloud platform, etc. show a strong interest. Microsoft will continue to carry its leading private cloud technology to help domestic enterprises and government organizations to build and apply cloud platforms.

"Responsible editor: Ma Yi TEL: (010) 68476606"