Is testing cheaper?

Question

Automation

We are developing a DBMaster application that should work with different Oracle, SQL Server, mysql, ... databases, in different browsers IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, under different languages ​​English, Russian, etc - 3 measurements have been collected.
The task is to automate testing and build Continuous Delivery.
As a solution, we consider the creation of N virtual machines with different versions of SQL2005, SQL2008, etc. servers. Our team is distributed and they abandoned their servers (they used to be hosted at home - now on rackspace). Buying a machine on rackspace for each version of the database somehow turns out to be very expensive. Restoring and creating a new machine from a backup also requires costs (you need to program and integrate the solution with Jenkins + costs for io from cloud files).
Share possible solutions. Thank you.

Answer 1

You rent a server, install a free VMware vSphere Hypervisor (previously known as VMware ESXi Free) on it, and there are already a bunch of virtual machines with the necessary OS / DB versions in it.