Have you heard about a major shift taking place in the IT world? According to the Corporate Executive Board, within five years from 2010 IT departments will have shrunk by 75% . The majority of those workers will be either shifted to IT units within individual departments or to external cloud/service providers.
Testing in an Exchange environment has been a challenge for Red Gate Software for some time now as we developed and tested Exchange Server Archiver. Now we are working on a PST Importer tool, we had to once again ‘fire up’ our virtual servers. The problem was a bit more complex this time, because if we want to create a realistic test environment we should have about a hundred virtual machines that we could hook on to our domain. As before, we’ll need mailboxes for these users but this time we would like some of the PST files to be opened in some of the users’ Outlook (I’ll explain this later). So here’s how we managed to do this all without actually creating all the machines for it.