06.14.06

I have spent the week at Microsoft TechEd 2006, and attended a very interesting BOF (Birds of a Feather) session yesterday, called “Creative Uses of Virtualization in the Development Lab”.  The session was facilitated by VMWare, which was a pleasant surprise, since Microsoft is a competitor in this field — but many companies Microsoft competes with are prominently featured here.

The best part was hearing how people are using the VMs:

• beta testing:  if a client agrees to participate in a beta test, they are shipped a complete virtual machine instance to run (using VMPlayer — which is available at no charge).  Aside from protecting the beta customer from installation and configuration, this allows the customer to send a snapshot of the entire environment (OS instance) along with a bug report
• maintaining legacy applications:  when a product needs to be supported for several years, there is a danger that other changes (development tools, operating systems at the company, drivers, DLLs, jars, whatever) will change and make it subsequently impossible to maintain.  One person related that his company creates a VM for a developer that contains everything to maintain and build a complete copy of the application (when it is “retired”), and tucks it away for future maintenance
• training:  This was not from the BOF, but from the huge HOLs (Hands on Labs) that surround the Expo floor here at TechEd.  When you type in the number of a lab, the software on the workstation copies a VM (Virtual PC this time) over and starts it up.  The VM is configured with everything needed for the lab:  tools, servers, test files.  This process takes maybe 90 seconds.  When you leave the VM goes away (your changes are not saved)
• Virtual Appliances:  VMWare maintains a repository of “virtual appliances” (VMs configured to do something, complete with an OS, usually Linux), that can be downloaded from VMTN (VM Technology Network).  Examples include a firewall, a “clean” (no cookies, keyloggers, etc) OS for doing home banking, an isolated browsing environment to let your kids loose in, etc. 
• Testing setups:  okay, not so novel, but worthwhile for complicated test environments, where you need database profiles, test data, comms setups, and so on.  The ability to reset and run with complete confidence that nothing has been messed up is something to think about.
• Demo environments:  as above with testing, except prospects are watching
• Production Troubleshooting:  often we cannot troubleshoot a problem in production because we need to get customers up and running ASAP.  If there is time to copy the file containing the VM image (assumption is your production is virtual), you can copy it, start up the virtual server again, and still have the “damaged” VM to troubleshoot with.