Here at BMC, we have test labs that serve many product lines and the labs are located across the globe. Fortunately, we also have access to BMC tools that get the job done like BMC Performance Manager for Databases, BMC Remedy Action Request System with Help Desk, Asset Management, Change Management, provisioning, monitoring and discovery tools that help schedule the resources.
The IT folks (talk.bmc’s Steve Carl included) are doing a great job of going a measured step at a time and automating where it makes sense. It’s an exciting story and I hope to post a white paper or technical article about it soon. It’s like an investigative report on doing Business Service Management at BMC.
I’d like to hear your stories of provisioning and change management as it relates to test labs and other shared servers. Tell us the real headaches and IT Dirty Jobs when you have to manage varied resources. My example is making 14 different platforms available for testing, from Windows 2000 on any old hardware to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.0 on a zSeries 64-bit system.