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The Rise of Virtual Labs


By Andrew Binstock
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June 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 2)
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.




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