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A knockout blow for Borland?
MicroFocus has upped its offer for Borland Software to $1.50, hoping to chase off a mystery suitor also pursuing the ALM vendor.
07/06/2009 12:26 PM EST

Is the mystery Borland suitor Serena?
Borland software is considering an offer from another company after a preliminary deal with MicroFocus. Is Serena the new company?
06/30/2009 01:55 PM EST

Windows 7 - An eBayer's dream product?
Windows 7 pre-orders can make people money on eBay.
06/29/2009 03:48 PM EST

 

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The Real Value of Virtualization


By Andrew Binstock
November 1, 2006 — 
Ask most developers what virtualization does for them, and they’ll tell you it enables them to test software on multiple operating systems. Ask most IT managers, and they’ll say it provides server consolidation. Testing and server consolidation are the two drivers that have kept virtualization alive during the past few years. By limiting its potential to these two niches, however, sites end up overlooking the real value of virtualization.

I believe virtualization is about to break out in the enterprise. Two reasons are the closing of the performance gap, due in part to processor innovations by Intel and AMD, and the increased discovery of the value of virtualization in some fascinating niches. In this column, I discuss the niches that are closely related to software development. My next column will focus on IT areas in which virtualization can bring benefits indirectly related to software development.

When most developers think of virtualization and testing, they think of setups akin to running VMware Workstation on their development system. They can create and load system images for Linux, Solaris x86 and Windows and then test the software on these platforms. This use case can be easily expanded. Products such as Surgient VQMS and VMware (formerly Akimbi) Slingshot enable testing of multisystem configurations. I discussed these products in my June 15 column (“The Rise of Virtual Labs,” page 33). They permit QA engineers to save all the state of all machines in a configuration with a single mouse click. The resulting snapshot is then stored in a library. If this is done when a bug occurs, the original developer can then check out this snapshot and see the bug along with all the data on how the system was set up and the software configured. The snapshot can even be replayed while the original configuration is still running (due to a built-in virtual router that performs NAT on the IP addresses and converts the MAC addresses so they don’t collide).

Virtualization is particularly useful for measuring software performance under varying scenarios. For example, it’s very simple to augment or decrease the amount of RAM on a given VM, by simply editing the VM’s config file. Prior to virtualization, testing multiple RAM scenarios was truly onerous. (I believe this aspect is one reason ISVs tend to greatly overstate the amount of RAM their software needs. It saves them from having to test on lesser systems, as the inflated minimum pushes the onus for underperformance on to the customer. This tendency toward excessive recommendations results in a pleasant discovery: Sites can consolidate more software on one server than they projected. This is because they can dial down the RAM on the individual VMs below the “recommended” but inflated minimums and still get good performance.)

Moreover, virtualization enables testers to ratchet network speed up and down, as well as change the number of virtual processors. This last point has some unfortunate constraints. No hypervisor today that I’m aware of exposes processor cores or hyper-threading pipelines as separate virtual processors. Rather, they map each socketed CPU to virtual processors. On a dual-core workstation, or a four- or eight-way server, this enables you to test the software using various CPU configurations and see how performance is affected. While such tests provide useful data that would be a real pain to obtain otherwise, they don’t reflect multicore systems. I expect all major hypervisors will eventually map individual cores to individual virtual CPUs. (However, hyper-threading pipelines, I suspect, will never be elevated to this level.) When the cores are exposed, virtual systems will be a wonderfully convenient way to test performance under numerous hardware scenarios.

Virtualization can also protect IP when offshoring. In this scenario, developers log into a hosted virtual machine running on the customer’s systems. By careful restrictions on the VM’s network access, this approach makes it difficult to copy or steal IP. All file I/O is kept on the VM. Developers code and save to the local VM and have no way to do I/O that is local to them. So, they cannot copy files (barring the use of a screen scraper). This setup is not ironclad, of course, but it helps enforce greater control over IP. The benefit of virtualization in this case is that the VM can be configured to block I/O to any place other than its own image. In addition, the customer can configure the VMs with the exact tools it wants the contract developers to use, and it can set up automated background processes (such as code check mechanisms, build processes and even metrics gathering).

Virtualization is on the verge of proving its value in many new areas that benefit development. Next time, I’ll discuss some more thought-provoking applications.

Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.


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