Service environment details
Standard environments
The types of environments provided will vary by Helix subscription service. Please refer to the information detailed in the BMC Helix Core services table for which environments are provided by a particular service.
- Development / Tailoring
- Quality Assurance (QA)
- Production
Separate customer environments are provisioned for your BMC Helix services. Application updates flow from the development/tailoring environment through QA before going live in production. These environments contain the most recent generally available (GA) version of the products and out-of-the-box content (including services, templates, requests, catalogs, and so on), pre-installed from a golden image. Following the solution build and test, the environment is moved to QA so that the customer can perform the required user acceptance testing prior to going live. For services where a QA environment is not provided, user acceptance testing is performed in the development environment.
Environment | Purpose |
|---|---|
Development / Tailoring | Creation of customer-specific integrations, workflow, and data configurations |
Quality Assurance (QA) | Release, testing, and validation of your custom application components prior to live operation |
Production | Operation of your BMC Helix processes which are available to end users |
Environments are available to customers at all times and do not require a request to be created for provisioning. Customer data is logically segregated from other customers data.
Services are hosted and delivered from secure data center facilities. To review a list of BMC Helix public and private hosting locations, please visit Service Locations. Your BMC hosting location, datacenters, and additional subprocessor details are outlined within your SaaS contract.
BMC Helix subscription services and data stores are spread out across multiple availability zones, typically three, with active-active configuration for the production environment to meet a highly available architecture. Backup data is stored at a separate location or zone, but always within the same country. These zones are distinct locations within a region that are engineered to be isolated with its own infrastructure, power, connectivity and failure potential from other availability zones.
Customer environments are controlled, monitored, and managed by BMC SaaS Operations (BMC Cloud locations also include the underpinning application and infrastructure aspects of the service). Areas of focus include hosting, storage, network, application software, and the connectivity between the cloud and the customers' premises. Additionally, the service includes the management of standard operational activities such as data and system backup, and recovery.
Non-production environments
BMC Helix Service Management non-production environments, including development, QA and any additional environments purchased, are not scaled to the same specification as the production system and therefore are not capable of processing production-level workloads. Non-production systems are not configured for high availability but are scaled to sufficiently handle the following workloads:
- Development: up to 50
- QA: up to 50
Environment naming conventions
BMC employs standard naming conventions for its customer environments depending on how the environment is to be used. Environment naming conventions are listed under the Activation-activities page for each service.
Performance Testing
As part of our commitment in delivering a high-quality service, BMC Helix conducts rigorous performance testing to evaluate and ensure the responsiveness, stability, and scalability of your subscription under expected and peak usage conditions.
While customers are welcome to conduct performance testing within your purchased capacity, BMC will not be directly involved. If you wish to perform this in a non-production environment and require similar performance to your production environment, for example upscaling your non-production environment e.g. QA, please contact your Account Management for pricing.
However, please note stress testing is strictly prohibited.
For customers interested in conducting independent performance testing on an additional non-production environment, please review the BMC Helix additional environment option available.