Virtualization

VMware teamed with SpringSource takes cloud computing head on

The VMworld 2009 opening keynote began like a rock concert with pulsing music and a light show as the morning’s keynote speaker, Tod Nielsen, took the stage. Nielsen, VMware’s Chief Operating Officer, introduced the conference venue with exciting news for the company’s multiple products and services.

None of which measured up to the audience’s response when Nielsen was joined on stage by Steve Herrod, CTO and vice president of R&D for SpringSource. Herrod reviewed VMware’s plans for SpringSource, which he’d already blogged about in August.

SpringSource, a commercial open source company, started by creating tools that competed with Java; but in the last few years has released a more diverse tool developer. Combined with the VMware infrastructure, Herrod said, SpringSource’s software will bring advanced development and storage capabilities to data centers.

“I am very excited about this,” said Rob Zylowski, Director IP for GlassHouse Technologies Inc. “With VMware and SpringSource working as one, they will be formidable competition for Apple’s cloud powered initiative.”

Chris Wolf, Burton Group senior analyst, is another industry expert who voiced enthusiasm, Twittering and blogging about the SpringSource-VMware combination throughout the opening day of VMworld. On his blog, he wrote:

“Rod Johnson did a tremendous job with the SpringSource demo. Giving application owners an interface to provision an app locally, or to an internal or external cloud was spot-on. IT service delivery requires IT operations to give application owners and individual business units interfaces that they understand… this is a technology VMware ships should begin working with in their labs.”

Stay tuned for additional blogs, videos and impressions from VMworld.

TechEd 2009: Cloud computing not a hot topic

Moving software development and testing to cloud environments wasn’t a hot topic at Microsoft TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles. Sure, there were some TechEd sessions on cloud computing, and
Microsoft cloud computing evangelist Steve Martin talked up Azure; but a good number of attendees, particularly in the software development field, said cloud isn’t on their agenda now.

“People are waiting to see if cloud computing has staying power and what its true importance will be,” said Wayne Ariola, strategy vice president for Parasoft Corp. told me.

Then again, some attendees and vendors at the show are gung-ho about the cloud. For example, Greg Allen — First Financial Bank SCCM 2007 administrator — told me he’s keen on Microsoft’s virtualization and cloud technologies.

Let’s take a look at what people on both sides of the cloud had to say at TechEd.

Some attendees said that development teams with a wait-and-see cloud adoption strategy could be eating early adopters’ dust. They noted the advantages of using cloud environments for software testing; particularly the ability to test applications in a full production environment.

While the pro-cloud people I met at TechEd don’t advocate dropping development into cloud computing without due diligence, they do think that companies should prepare for and do pilots in cloud environments today.

“It’s not a future technology. It’s a now technology,” said Margaret Lewis, AMD director of commercial ISV marketing. Indeed, she thinks cloud computing is a disruptive technology with the potential to help the economy recover. She foresees the emergence of a bevy of boutique cloud providers for various vertical and horizontal markets. In this video, she explains why cloud preparation and usage should be on software companies’ agenda.

While Lewis sees cloud computing as a recession beater, others at TechEd said that the economy will hold up cloud adoption.

The recession has forced many companies to stall, scrap or not start development projects, moving what’s left to the cloud isn’t a compelling objective now. “They’re also waiting they don’t see cloud as operationally necessary or strategic competitively,” said Ariola. Also, he’s talked to quite a few companies that recently adopted virtualization to consolidate servers, particularly in their test/dev labs, and are happy with the results. They don’t feel an immediate need to do another move right now.

In my TechEd conversations, about a dozen people opined that cloud services aren’t mature or production-ready. Their views reminded me of my recent interview with Eugene Ciurana, director of systems infrastructure at LeapFrog Enterprises, a large U.S. educational toy company, in which he warned that cloud service-level agreements aren’t up to par.

Cloud providers have to work out some thorny issues before scores of development teams get on board, Ariola said. In his work in the field, Ariola has heard many ISVs express concerns about cloud security. Those fears may be well-founded, according to this week’s Forrester Research report citing problems early cloud adopters have had with customer privacy protection.

Ariola thinks dev/test could be a killer app for cloud computing at some point, but right now “it’s not on most application developers radar.” He likened the cloud’s clout today to that of service-oriented architectures (SOA) in its early days. “This is a major change, and it won’t take place overnight.”

Yes, the cloud adoption pros and cons debate will continue for a while. Watch this blog, as well as SearchSoftwareQuality.com and SearchCloudComputing.com, for more information. Meanwhile, check out the news and views in these recent articles and videos:

• Feds get specific on cloud interoperability
• Testing software in the cloud: Pros and cons
• Testing software with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Testing software in the cloud: Pros and cons

Testing software in the cloud: Pros and cons

Consultant Bernard Golden - author of IT bestseller, Virtualization for Dummies — is an advocate for virtualization and cloud computing technologies, but he doesn’t want anyone to approach either wearing rose-colored glasses. I met and talked with Golden recently about a slew of IT and development topics. In this post, I’ll share his thoughts on the pros and cons of software testing in cloud environments. In his day job, by the way, Golden is CEO of the IT consulting firm, HyperStratus.

Let’s start out by meeting Golden - via video — and hearing about his experience with a software testing project on Amazon’s cloud.

Expanding upon this sound bite, Golden told me that doing software testing in a cloud environment makes sense for several reasons. For one thing, it’s easier and less costly to mirror a production environment in the cloud. Very few development labs actually have the exact server and software environment as does the data center that runs the application in production. The cost of that set-up would be astronomical. Along the same lines, development in the cloud makes it possible to scale up and scale down the application for testing of various load sizes…without incurring hardware costs. So, the cloud supports difficult testing requirements like load testing and scaling that many labs can’t support.

Golden pointed out some challenges in software testing in the cloud. First, there’s the tricky business of finding the right cloud services provider. Then, software testers will have to learn some new skills. Development teams have to be careful about integration with internal applications, as service endpoints are required and configuration will be different in a cloud setting.

Developers and software testers will also have to figure out how to handle application lifecycle management in cloud environments, Golden said. Expect to see lifecycle and architecture testing issues with web and application servers, the load balancer and databases.

Golden will be writing about his work in cloud and virtual lab environments in a SearchSoftwareQuality.com series. The first installment is Testing software with Amazon Web Services. In March, he wrote an article for SearchServerVirtualization.com on Choosing an application architecture for the cloud.

What are your concerns about, hopes for or experiences with software development and testing in virtual labs and/or cloud environments? Tell me your story via video or a simple email:  jstafford at techtarget.com.

Virtual networks: Fully representative and protected

Many IT environments of all sizes are enjoying virtualization in some capacity to save on costs, provision systems quicker and consolidate equipment. While the time to market availability for virtual systems is much quicker, there are built-in safeguards that can be rolled into any test, development or software quality effort.

All virtualization platforms offer some form of virtualized network functionality. I’ll talk about VMware’s ESX and vCenter Server, as it is the most popular in the space. A virtual switch is where virtual machines are connected to the network, and on the host side that virtual switch has a configuration as well. For test purposes, a fully isolated network can be provisioned for use by virtual machines on the host. Take the following example, an organization’s internal IT staff provisions a special virtual local area network (VLAN) to the host system, which is then configured as a port group in the virtual switch. At that point a virtual machine can be configured to access that VLAN for a private, testing only environment. The figure below shows an example of this configuration where four virtual machines are assigned to a private VLAN:

The private VLAN is not connected to the rest of the company network, yet the four virtual machines can communicate with each other. I like using the isolated virtual networks as they can be populated with other systems to test communications between virtual machines. Further, built-in virtual machine functionality of cloning and conversion allows copies of live systems to be put into the test environment quite easily. This example is not specific enough for many to take and use in their internal testing, but should be a springboard for conversation to see how network virtualization technology can be applied to your software testing and quality procedures.

Application performance testing issues: Cloud, virtual labs, scale-up

Application performance testing used to be a standalone process, but the emergence of dynamic, complex mission-critical applications, virtualization and cloud computing calls for putting it into a larger practice, Mark Kremer, CEO of Precise Software Solutions of Redwood Shores, Calif., told me recently. In our discussion, he offered some advice about how to handle new challenges facing those who must ensure top application performance.

I asked Kremer what complications porting apps to the cloud add to application performance testing and management. He replied that the dynamic nature of development in the cloud means that application performance must be monitored constantly.

“In physical environments, application performance management assumes quasi-static resource configurations; the computing power, network bandwidth, memory pools, and system overhead are invariable over time or at least until the next configuration upgrade,” Kremer said. “Under these assumptions, time measurements are consistent as they were measured under the same terms. Once an application is run on a cloud, its configuration may change from one invocation to another, or even within the same run, as processes may be transparently moved around the cloud. This phenomenon of ever-changing resources makes time measurements inconsistent as they have been taken under a different condition. Correcting, or normalizing time measurements to a standard scale is conditional to self referencing performance monitoring, and is a daunting challenge to model and implement.”

(For more info on software testing and cloud computing, check out my interview with Eugene Ciurana, director of systems infrastructure at LeapFrog Enterprises, a large U.S. educational toy company.)

The dynamic nature of virtualized environments also requires changes in how application performance is monitored and testing, Kremer said. The development/testing team should keep an internal application clock — app time, if you will — that is invariant to the underlying hardware. He explained:

“For example, a transaction will spend the same time measured by the application clock in a Java method regardless of the power of CPUs used in each invocation,” he said. “As application performance management evolves to include this concept, developers building applications for virtual or more commonly mixed mode — virtual and physical — can get around the semantics of time in virtual environments.”

Talking about application performance in general, Kremer stressed that testing can’t just take place in a lab, because it’s so hard to replicate real production environments there. Even if the production environment can be created in a lab, often performance still changes when apps are placed on a real, dynamic production line.

“This dynamic manner of problem resolution analyzes the data that causes performance-loss by tracking spikes in user behavior, patterns in data accumulations, and changes to the systems configurations,” Kremer said. “Application performance testing relies more on static test models which makes it tough to replicate real-world production environments.”

I asked Kremer how scale-up changes what must be tested to ensure stellar application performance. In response, he said that when applications scale up, performance testing must change from being input oriented – focusing on test patterns, synthetic transactions, etc. — to being throughput oriented, where the focus is on transaction monitoring, performance base lining and so on.

“As systems scale up, their performance testing paradigm shifts from predefined synthetic tests to monitoring and self-reference,” Kremer added. “For optimal results, IT needs to identify the top, say 20, transactions of the system, constantly monitor their performance, their component’s performance, and the time allocations of various tiers in the system. Then it must self reference these measurements hour-to-hour, day-to-day, season-to-season…to detect performance degradation, offending transaction components or performance hot-spots.”

That’s all from my interview with Mark Kremer. SearchSoftwareQuality.com news writer Colleen Frye is covering application performance topics, so watch for more articles in the news section. Here’s a sampling: CareGroup solves application performance issues with APM tool and Don’t let poor website performance ruin e-commerce sales.

Virtual labs: Are they for you?

The buzz about cloud computing has people talking about services such as virtual test environments. With such test services, organizations forgo the expense and time involved with setting up test environments. You don’t have to worry about the hardware or software — just pick what you want to include in the environment and your test lab can be ready in a matter of minutes. And then you pay as you go, running the environment for only as long as you need it.

Recently I talked with Shannon Martin, manager of technical training at both VDIworks and ClearCube, about how those companies use virtual labs from Skytap when developing and testing software, as well as when training customers how to use their software. Martin had nothing but good things to say about the virtual lab platform. She found it easy to use and liked the low costs associated with it.

This month Skytap started reaching out to enterprises that want what they call “hybrid cloud computing.” Via a VPN, companies can connect their virtual environments with their in-house resources.

For many companies, such services are ideal. But there are still concerns among many, including security and uptime. Scott Roza, CEO of Skytap, said in their virtual environments, people are given rights to access the environments and the data in them. Regarding uptime, he said customers pay as they go. So if by chance Skytap ceases to exist, customers pay only for the services they received.

Understandably companies may still have a problem with that if, for example, they’re in the middle of testing a project and their test lab disappears on them. It’s more than just the cost of the service; it’s the cost of their not making their deadlines.

What do you think about virtual test environments? Are they worth pursuing or should organizations create their own test labs?