Dev, QA and then....Production?

[MisterC]

Hello all -

A fellow in a previous thread asked a similar question that that been troubling me for the last several weeks.

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=75073&tstart=0

My company has a non-existent development environment, a QA environment on its last legs, and a production environment in dire need of an upgrade in hardware. Due to time constraints our Technical Operations team has already ordered the production hardware - seventy-five IBM x3850s running Windows Server 2003. Since I have taken a new position I have tasked with fixing our Dev and QA environments however my budget is about half of the production one and I need to build both on that budget. If I were to use ESX Server I could get both built with the same number of servers as production or more. In a perfect world without problems I would be all set - but the problem lies with the set up: Running VMWare in Dev and QA but not in Production. Should I expect headaches?

I have just been introduced to Infrastructure3 and ESX server through a four day training course and it sounds intriguing however if we were to run VMWare in Dev and in QA, I have this feeling it could lead to issues running the same code in Production because it would use straight hardware. I hear from the naysayers that our QA team could spend days troubleshooting bugs due to VMWare that may never show in production or vice verse, all because the Dev and QA environment wouldn't be running on hardware alone - my gut instinct tells me that isn't the case because .NET uses OS level drivers and its own framework. The shop we run is 100% Windows .NET development but we have been known to use third party applications that may have been written in C++ or Java to create charts and graphs. I'm not familiar enough to know what kinds of programs access hardware drivers or hardware itself but I am aware of this potential issue for non-Windows code.

So here I am - a production environment already in the works running the OS on bare metal and I need a Dev and QA environment built in the next couple of months. My anxiety of running VMWare in Dev and QA, but not in Production is really bothering me. Does anyone have this kind of setup currently or can anyone explain why I should not be concerned and just roll forward? Any advice would be extremely helpful.

[Jae_Ellers]

Unless you run specialized hardware that is accessed directly from your software I wouldn't worry about it. We use VMware to develop applicatons and to QA them as well, and our code does run on specialized hardware. However, the hardware is well abstracted and can be run across the network as well, so the .Net apps can startup on any PC and then connect to a real or simulated instrument.

If you don't have hardware devices or hardware driver development to worry about I'd aim for having most of the QA & dev on ESX. It will be rock solid. I'd make sure I had some actual hardware for regression testing, to be safe and to placate the nay-sayers. I'd also make sure I had some rocket ships (fast 2 slot dual or quad core workstations with lotsa ram) with VMware Workstation 6.x loaded. WS 6 has some cool dev features. One of the best is the ability to capture the VM state as if it were a movie. So you can find a bug, record it happening, and play it back. But since it's a VM and running system state, you can debug the system as you step the system forward.

If things like you are afraid of were happening you'd be able to search the M$ KB for VMware and find a lot of crowing by BillCo. As it is there are a few articles, but I haven't seen one that points at a problem that is only reproducible on VMware. Some sound that way, but they grudgingly admit they are Windows issues and "may" occur on physical systems as well.

http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?catalog=LCID%3D1033&spid=global&query=vmware&adv=

[daniel_uk]

This isnt a SAP implementation is it!!! They are the only software company that get this obtrusive about the testing streams.

I can see from a Developer and application perspective different hardware is something that could be a possible problem...but in the Infrastructure world we know this dosnt mean diddly squat.

To meet them half way I would invest in Platespin to do some V2P's this would mean that you could provide a good mechanism that the Vendors usually say which is "replicate the problem on Physical hardware". The VM will see the same CPU details in the System device manager so you never know they may not even notice!

Really the benefits need to be notified to decision makers on this project the snapshotting feature and provisioning alone will pay back on any problems.

[FredPeterson]

>> seventy-five x3850s

Off subject but have to:

Wowzers. That is one heck of a lot of rackspace, what, thats 5 racks?

Are these fully decked x3850's? Meaning all 4 sockets in use and memory risers used?

That many 3850's could host one helluva a lot of VMs

[Ken_Cline]

Remember this...

\- applications run on operating systems

\- operating systems run on device drivers and a hardware abstraction layer (HAL)

\- device drivers and the HAL run on the hardware (physical or virtual)

Unless you're writing device drivers and HALs, you're in pretty good shape...

[petedr]

We used to run our Oracle environments exactly in that manner. Our development and QA enviornments where virtuals and production was still setup as a physical machine. We never had any issues with development or patch testing. I don't see any issues with that approach, you should be ok. For us we did eventually move production to a VM as well to realize all the benefits Vmware brings across all environments.

[Ken_Cline]

>> seventy-five x3850s

That made your hardware salesperson one happy camper ... right at the end of the quarter, too

[MisterC]

Thanks all - I'm going to use our Dev environment as a Proof of Concept and see how it goes. QA isn't ready yet and they're going to front some cash for additional servers. Yes the x3850s was a tremendous purchase but the hardware is necessary for such a quick turn around - we get a total of 15 million hits a day so unless we perform a solid POC and load tests I can't be sure how well we'll do in Production. Once I get the Dev environment set we're going to load test the VM images and see how it goes. Thanks for all your input!

[MisterC]

Cheers!