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Borland software is considering an offer from another company after a preliminary deal with MicroFocus. Is Serena the new company?
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VMware Adds Ability To Replay Crashes


By Alex Handy
June 1, 2007 — 
As if virtualization hadn’t already made QA engineers’ lives easier, VMware Workstation 6 adds in replay capabilities that allow developers to rewind and step through crashes moment by moment.

Released in the second week of May, the new version of VMware’s desktop product adds support for dual monitors and speed enhancements. But the most significant change to this version is the ability to treat a virtual machine like a VCR: Users can record, play back, rewind and pause the entire virtualized system.

James Phillips, senior director of software life-cycle solutions at VMware, an EMC subsidiary, said that the new record/replay capabilities should help developers glean large amounts of information about their programs by replaying crashes, slowdowns and trouble spots during execution.

“This allows you to begin, at any point in time, recording the activity occurring within a virtual machine. We guarantee the replay will be precisely as it was in the original record time. Developers can go back in time, and run back up to a state where they’re finding a bug or an anomaly. With this technology, you can rewind and run back up to see the states, the I/O and everything else,” said Phillips, who claimed the new capabilities took more than two years to complete.

“We record all timing changes [in a] time-delimited [format] so you can literally go back in time with a debugger and do single-step execution,” said Phillips. “If a crash occurs, it’s going to occur again. You can single-step through the execution and have all external events happen as they were, so you can see precisely what happened from a register perspective or a buffer perspective. You have the ability to roll forward in a deterministic way and see everything you would see in a debug inspection.”

Currently, recorded virtual machine events cannot be transferred from one computer to another, but Phillips did state that this type of thing was in VMware’s plans for the future. “In the current release of the product, we don’t expose [that] functionality…but it is a direction we will be heading in,” he said, adding that future versions of VMware’s server product will take advantage of this technology.

“On one machine, the execution will be maintaining the recording that we can then ship over to another data center, that will get it to the same state of execution. If the first machine crashes, we can keep going with the execution from where it left off on the other server,” said Phillips.

‘HUGELY IMPORTANT’
Theresa Lanowitz, principal analyst at Voke, said that the new playback capabilities of VMware Workstation 6 are extremely compelling. “It’s hugely important. Now you isolate the exact time of the error, not merely say it was between 10:00 am and 10:07 am. You can look [at the application] millisecond by millisecond,” said Lanowitz.

VMware’s future plans for the system are also on Lanowitz’s hot list. On the subject of the company’s plans to evolve the playback system for use on servers, Lanowitz said, “This allows you to capture a virtualized moment in time and take it with you, like on a USB key.”

Additional changes to this version of VMware Workstation include the ability to use two monitors on a workstation, and support for paravirtualization, a method by which the host and virtualized operating systems can communicate, yielding performance enhancements for the user. Dual-head computers can now be forced to point the host operating system at one monitor and the virtual machine at the other, or users can hand over both monitors to the VM.

VMware Workstation 6 supports the Virtual Machine Interface specification for paravirtualization, which is currently available only in Ubuntu Linux.

VMware Workstation 6 also supports Windows Vista as both a host and virtualized operating system.


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