Improving certification lab

This blueprint is about improving the internal Canonical system testing labs. It is unlikely to be of interest to anyone not directly involved in the Canonical daily testing lab setup.

We need to accomplish a few things to help better organise hardware, write specific tests for both certification and QA testing, as well as planning future expansions in hardware. For instance, it would be nice to be able to look at a system and know that it has X GB RAM, 4 SATA hard disks, an HP model FOO SATA RAID controller, and a Broadcom 5906 dual port NIC without having to log into the system and investigate.

Also, it would be great to plan out exactly what we need in terms of hardware (both servers and peripherals like enclosures) infrastructure and so forth and decide what specifically we want to acquire. Some work has already been started on both these items by Marc and Jeff and others.