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The Real Value of Virtualization

By Andrew Binstock

November 1, 2006 — (Page 1 of 2)
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).

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