VMware Adds Ability To Replay Crashes
June 1, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 2)
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.
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/30707
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Zeichick’s Take: Radio moves from analog waveforms to digital packets
Streaming radio highlights the need for streaming applications to be designed to take up as little bandwidth as possible
|
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Appcelerator Acquires Cocoafish to Add Instant Mobile Cloud Capabilities to its Industry Leading Titanium Platform
Appcelerator Offers Messaging, Social, Location and Storage Mobile Cloud Services to All Mobile App Publishers
|
|
ComponentOne Releases a Collection of 40+ UI Widgets Powered by HTML5 and jQuery
ComponentOne has announced the 2012 release of Wijmo: a kit of UI widgets for HTML5 and jQuery development
|
Taking enterprise architecture to the business side
Startup Corso is bringing out a cloud-based planning platform that ties into business plans
|
|
Top five apps to manage your workload
Web applications offer new ways to track your “to-do” lists
|
|
Not so fast when it comes to testing in the cloud
Developers face outsourcing, virtual lab management and mobile devices as obstacles
|
|
Xceed releases UX-focused suite for Microsoft’s WPF
"Blendables" helps match user experiences to developer visions
|
Are you at risk for burnout?
Burnout is a severe problem and it can strike at any time. Here's how to tell if you are nearing the edge.
|
|
Agility, mom, and apple pie
If we're to evaluate the state-of-the-art in software development, we should start with the values espoused in the Agile Manifesto.
|
|
RIM woos developers with free tablet
How do you get more apps ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook? By giving every developer a free tablet, of course!
|
|
GitHire: Use Headhunters to Find Your Perfect Programmer
Are you a hiring manager tired of scouring the job boards? Check out this new service that will find 5 people interested in your jobs.
|
The Hidden Costs of Software Licensing
Moving beyond paper-based software licensing to more flexible, software-based licensing is a business decision. There is a growing trend tow...
|
|
Case Study: You May Need a Development Mechanic
As a contractor for a major financial player in Germany, SOBEGE, a German-based consultancy specializing in embedded IT and web services, wa...
|
|
Ensuring Software Quality at a Major International Bank
One of the world’s leading international banks has adopted AgitarOne technology for delivering generated unit tests for their Java software...
|
|
Load Testing Adobe Flex Applications
Adobe Flex applications may be different from applications you’ve worked with before. For classic HTML web applications, the server does all...
|