It has 50 million customers around the world, ranging from large corporate enterprises, government agencies, and higher education institutions to small businesses and individuals.

Product Testing Required Too Much Hardware
It is essential for the company to validate and test its enterprise products. Customers use these products in large configurations, with as many as 20,000 clients for a server. For load testing, Symantec needs large-scale test beds. Mike Linsenmayer, QA Labs Manager, found that the hardware needed to simulate these diverse client environments was expensive to buy, host, and maintain.

Linsenmayer describes his testing configuration: "We need to be able to simulate a large scale enterprise environment, so we install VMware on a Windows NT machine and configure Windows 9x, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and even Windows 3.1 inside virtual machines. With VMware, we can easily get an additional two to three nodes per machine. They look just like any other node on the network, with unique protocol address, etc."

Using virtual machines lets Symantec better leverage its hardware investment. Since VMware makes each physical host into the equivalent of three machines, the company gets 300 testing clients instead of 100. And, because 200 of these clients are virtual machines, there's a great reduction in space and power. As Linsenmayer puts it, "With VMware, I can get 300 test machines in a space the size of a Volkswagen."

VMware also provides a quick setup for a large number of machines. Since each virtual machine offers a standard set of devices, setting up the tests is a snap. Linsenmayer's team uses Symantec's Norton Ghost 6.0 Enterprise Edition to copy various images of machines out to VMware. They can install a 600-machine test bed in less than a day. "It's really easy to set up," Linsenmayer reports.

Other Options More Expensive
VMware really saves money for Symantec. At first, Linsenmayer considered outsourcing. "We looked at outsourcing testing capacity," he says. "The cost was around $1,000 a day for 100 machines."

Symantec typically buys rack mount units for quality assurance testing. According to Linsenmayer, "It costs about $150,000 for 100 rack mount PCs. Our VMware licenses are a lot cheaper than real PCs. It's a huge cost savings."

Linsenmayer's team also appreciates the overall cost savings. "We save on space, power, air-conditioning and maintenance. We were purchasing computers -- 300 at a time. That hardware gets to be obsolete; VMware doesn't."

Getting More From The Test Lab
Linsenmayer is one happy customer. "We're planning on quickly rolling it out in additional test labs," he says. He feels the cost savings and ease of management make it easy to justify VMware. "It's a solution that I would recommend to any quality assurance manager who wants to leverage a hardware investment while scaling a testing environment."