Realization of Virtualization

By Andrew Binstock

November 15, 2006 —

In my last column, I discussed how new uses of virtualization are providing developers and testers with innovative solutions that go beyond the traditional use case of verifying code portability. In this installment, I want to show additional applications of virtualization that are secondarily related to development. They illustrate how effectively the technology can be leveraged, given a little creative thinking.

Training. Any developer who has been to a class with a hands-on lab has known the frustration of wasting time installing and configuring tools and software. Trainers, too, are driven mad by this problem. Virtualization is tailor-made for this problem, and it provides two alternative approaches. The first is to give everyone a DVD with virtualization software and a VM system image. Have students install the former and then load the latter. Fifteen minutes later, every student is looking at the same software screen and is ready to begin working. This scenario, however, can be improved. Surgient, a company in Austin, Texas, with several virtualization packages, provides software to host those VMs on corporate systems. A trainer sets up one VM, then loads up, let’s say, 15 images onto a server before a class. The students then dial into the VMs using remote desktop protocol (RDP) or VNC (a free desktop-sharing protocol from RealVNC at www.realvnc.com). For this, students need only network connectivity and they don’t have to load any software to start tackling the lab work. An additional benefit is that, at the end of class, the students can pick up the image of their VM, so that all their work is available to them and they can continue working where they left off.

Demos. Last week, I was on-site at a vendor of enterprise software who was showing me the latest in ESB tools. During the demo, the engineer suddenly encountered a problem that brought the whole show to a stop for 15 minutes. After a lot of embarrassed scrambling, she discovered that the previous user of the demo example had left the software in an unexpected state. Such problems happen all the time. If you’ve been to trade shows and conferences, you surely have had the experience as well. For such demos, virtualization saves the day. You set up and configure the demo in a VM, verify it and then carefully store the VM image in a library. Now, anytime you want to trot out the demo, you make a copy of that library image. This step assures you that your demo system is always in a known clean state and that it works. Moreover, if you decide to upgrade the demo, you can upgrade all instances immediately by changing this one VM.

Some demos require multiple systems (such as a database server and a Web server) to properly illustrate important features. Traditionally, sales folks have solved this problem by running a small instance of a DBMS and a Web server on the demo system. This solution is workable, but fraught with danger. A better way to solve this is to host the demo on company servers, using VMs for all the constituent systems and for the demo software itself. Prospective customers log in from their own systems, in a manner akin to the training scenario I just described. This solution has the added benefit of allowing multiple participants in a meeting to each have their own demo experience.

Tech Support and Helpdesk. One frustration tech-support workers grapple with is the exponential combination of configurations that arise when a product can access several databases, work with several Web servers, and run on multiple operating systems. Even a modest number of items can lead to dozens of unique configurations. By having a library of VMs prebuilt with all the supported platforms and packages, an ISV or an in-house helpdesk team can quickly assemble the specific configuration of components a caller might have. Helpdesks that emulate customer configurations from a library of VMs have the added capability of being able to set up the configuration in real time—while the caller is on the line. Configuration bugs are particularly easy to identify this way, but the solution still works well for all problems. It has one other benefit: When the call is over, the support engineer can save the VMs in a library and tag them with the customer’s name. This way, on subsequent calls, the images can simply be reloaded without the need for configuration again.

These are three leading-edge use cases that I think will become fairly standard during the next 18 months. Beyond them are bleeding-edge applications, such as using VMs for load balancing and running multiple apps on hardware clusters. But I’ll cover those solutions when they become larger blips on the radar screen.

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

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