Parasoft Virtualize

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Introduction

Parasoft Virtualize is an enterprise service virtualization solution. Its product page explains that it lets you simulate any dependent system and switch seamlessly between live systems and virtual services, so teams can test when dependencies are unavailable, incomplete, costly or shared.

Parasoft highlights several capability areas: codeless service virtualization; AI-powered API mocking that can create and manage REST API mocks from an LLM client or Virtualize’s AI assistant; test environment management; test data management, including generating synthetic data or masking production data; microservices testing by simulating dependent services across modern and legacy protocols such as REST, Kafka, gRPC and MQ; integrated API testing; load and performance testing; and reporting and analytics on the health and utilisation of the virtualization infrastructure. It cites broad protocol support, with more than 120 message formats and protocols including REST, SOAP, JMS, MQ and JDBC. Virtualize is part of the Parasoft platform alongside SOAtest for API testing.

Features

1. Broad protocol support: 120+ message formats and protocols.
2. Codeless and AI-assisted: Create virtual services without code.
3. Test data management: Synthetic data generation and masking.
4. Environment management: Switch between live and virtual services.

Pros

1. Enterprise breadth: Covers legacy and modern protocols.
2. Integrated platform: Works with Parasoft SOAtest and reporting.

Cons

1. Commercial licensing: Pricing is not published; see site.
2. Enterprise complexity: Best suited to larger organisations.

Usage and Links (Example)

Typical workflow (see Parasoft’s documentation for details):

1. Record traffic between your application and a dependency, or import a service definition such as OpenAPI or WSDL.
2. Generate a virtual asset and configure responses, data sources and conditions.
3. Deploy the virtual asset to a Virtualize server and point the application under test at it.
4. Run functional, integration or performance tests in CI, switching between live and virtual services as needed.

Resources:

• Parasoft Virtualize website

Pricing

Commercial; pricing is not published. Contact Parasoft or see site.

Recommended for?

1. Enterprises with complex, multi-protocol dependencies such as MQ, JMS and mainframe services.
2. Teams already using Parasoft SOAtest.

Conclusion

Parasoft Virtualize is a comprehensive commercial service virtualization platform for organisations whose dependencies go well beyond HTTP.