I spoke with Jonah Paransky, VP of StackSafe, out on the vendor show floor at the fall Win Connections 2008 conference. The StackSafe appliance and software enables Windows IT Pros to test an application in a virtualized environment before rolling it out in a production environment.
The tools in StackSafe are designed specifically for IT Pros, who typically have to use test tools that aren't well suited to them, Paransky noted. Test tools usually run on the application as it's being developed and don't always take into consideration the problems the app will encounter in everyday use.
Check out the podcast where Paransky gets into the nitty-gritty of how this product works.
At the Connections conference StackSafe announced a new customer, Hearst Corporation, will be using StackSafe for email application testing.
For more on using virtualization for testing production software see Michael Otey's article Using Virtualization to Test SQL Server Express and Alan Sugano's article Server Virtualization Basics.