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The Rise of Virtual Labs


By Andrew Binstock
June 15, 2006 — 
Virtualization—the ability to run multiple hosted environments on the same hardware platforms—is a tool whose newfound popularity in IT is due to its longtime use by software developers.

A curious aspect to this affection is that the primary vendors of virtualization tools—VMware and Microsoft—did surprisingly little to make use of this enthusiasm or extend their tools for development environments. Instead, third parties have stepped into the breach. Two companies—Texas-based Surgient and a California-based start-up named Akimbi Systems—offer product suites that enable developers to quickly set up and run virtualized configurations. Recently, I have been examining their offerings.

Both companies focus on lab setups. Technically, the labs don’t have to be oriented toward software development, but in practice many of them are. Much of the remainder is used for testing and evaluating software.

Both vendors offer a means to easily set up and run configurations involving virtual machines (VMs) running on multiple servers. They provide tools to quickly configure new VMs and add them to (or remove them from) running configurations. Finally, they offer the critical ability to take snapshots of active configurations. This is a central, if not the central, feature of these packages.

It works like this. Let’s say you’re running a Java app server on one VM, a database on another, and three client VMs each running load simulators. When you reach 256 simultaneous connections, an exception occurs in the processing. So, you fire up this configuration and take a snapshot of the configuration as you reach the crucial threshold.

The snapshot can be sent to QA engineers for their examination. They can copy it many times so as to always have a fall-back snapshot to re-create the problem. And they can then fire up the snapshot and start stepping through the execution and tracing the exception. An interesting feature is that the snapshot and the original configuration can be running simultaneously without conflicts. As the snapshots use the same IP addresses and media access control (MAC) addresses as the original VMs, this simultaneous running requires some magic.

In the snapshots, a virtual router is bundled. It performs network-address translation (NAT) on the configuration, so that to the outside world there is no conflict of IP addresses; while within the configuration, the integrity of the original IP addresses is maintained. For external purposes, each network adapter’s MAC address is also remapped.

Akimbi adds elegance to this process by having secured its own vendor-specific MAC prefix from which these new MAC addresses are drawn. This step guarantees that the temporary MAC addresses cannot conflict with other hardware. (A MAC address is generally unique to each network adapter, and is based on organizationally unique identifiers, or OUIs, which are managed by the IEEE and available from the group at comparatively little cost.)

The Akimbi and Surgient products are effective packages for lab contexts.

Surgient has a separate line of products that address a rarely discussed application for which virtualization is tailor-made: education and training. Suppose you want to train your developers to use Ruby on Rails. You might create a VM with the Ruby runtime and needed libraries, the Komodo Ruby IDE, a Web server and a sample database. Then, depending on your lab configuration, you can run the VMs on a host machine, in which case Surgient’s VTMS helps with the provisioning.

If the class involves several lab exercises, you might want to move part of the configuration to multiple VMs, so that you can change out the database or the Web server and have students learn configuration of those packages as well.

Surgient also offers a slight modification of this concept for doing demos of software. Salespeople can assemble configurations that are relevant to prospects and deploy them on remote hosts and then dial in to run these tailored demos.

The first generation of virtualization was the mainframe, the second was today’s crop of hypervisors from Microsoft, VMware and recently from Xen. Layered on those products are the first generation of virtualization management tools. Topmost are the products that companies such as Akimbi and Surgient are shipping. Look for more tools to appear in this space. In the meantime, start thinking about how virtualization can help at your site.

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works.


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