Ranorex in the cloud - Azure
Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 4:54 am
Hi all,
Has anyone had any experience or tried running their Ranorex runtimes on cloud servers?
Some background:
In the past, we've always used VMs on our local ESX servers to spool up and host our Ranorex runtime instances. As they were all on our intranet and local subnet, it was easy to have them connect to network fileshares and move files around, as well as get their floating licenses from our local Ranorex license manager. The ESX server would hold up ok for a modest number of test VMs running at the same time.
Current challenge:
We're now working on a large project that involves developing (and of course testing) a cloud based application, so they've chosen Azure. While we could continue to use our old VMs on our local ESX to run the Ranorex tests, there was the thought that since we now have an Azure account, we could leverage some basic VMs from Azure to have our tests run there. They would theoretically be less prone to performance issues on a solid cloud infrastructure, rather than our dated ESX server.
So what am I actually asking?
I've managed to work out techniques to programmatically start/stop the Azure VMs, as well as open up the RDPs to them. But the problems I'm trying to work out are:
Has anyone had any experience or tried running their Ranorex runtimes on cloud servers?
Some background:
In the past, we've always used VMs on our local ESX servers to spool up and host our Ranorex runtime instances. As they were all on our intranet and local subnet, it was easy to have them connect to network fileshares and move files around, as well as get their floating licenses from our local Ranorex license manager. The ESX server would hold up ok for a modest number of test VMs running at the same time.
Current challenge:
We're now working on a large project that involves developing (and of course testing) a cloud based application, so they've chosen Azure. While we could continue to use our old VMs on our local ESX to run the Ranorex tests, there was the thought that since we now have an Azure account, we could leverage some basic VMs from Azure to have our tests run there. They would theoretically be less prone to performance issues on a solid cloud infrastructure, rather than our dated ESX server.
So what am I actually asking?
I've managed to work out techniques to programmatically start/stop the Azure VMs, as well as open up the RDPs to them. But the problems I'm trying to work out are:
- 1. Due to the virtual nature of cloud VMs (they present as a single DNS, but with unique ports), will that cause issues with the Ranorex license server? (Our IT hasn't opened ports yet for my trial Azure VMs to ping our license server for me to trial this yet)
- 2. Have people managed to work out how to easily get data to and from Azure VMs? I'm stuck on that one at the moment.