Virtual Worlds

Developers, software engineers, network engineers and common folk: Unite! Use VMWare workstation! (No, I don't hold any share in this company, am not related to any of it's employees, nor am I working there myself).

VMWare must be one of the best inventions ever. It's right up there with Subversion. Together with Zend Studio these are the tools that will make a PHP programmer happy. And a Linux specialist (Guru for some ;-)).

We have managed to get everyone enthousiastic about VMWare Workstation. We've found ways to utilize it as a development platform, a testing platform, as well as a demo platform. Because of it's ease of snapshotting and reverting back to those, we are able to test server and application upgrades in no-time. We can now do between 10 and 20 testing iterations per day per testing engineer, where in the old environment we were maybe able to go through one to two iterations.

Because our application will be rolled out to around 40 schools within the next two weeks, we want to be able to do this with the least amount of effort and after sales service. All servers are the same at the application level and can be upgraded through our update service. We're using RPMs to distribute the changes in server configuration and setup, as well as for the server based application updates. This way we can guarentee that all servers will be similar. And that will make future updates easier again. Lately I have been starting to view our servers as hardware firewall/router type of boxes that can be upgraded to a newer 'firmware' version.

Our VMWare setup helps us with that tremendously! We start out with a standard server that has been installed and configured through the same process as our regular servers are. We snapshot it at that point and use a debug Yum channel to upgrade the Virtual Machine. Basic functionality is checked and if all is fine, more extensive testing occurs.

The same happens with our new server installation process. That can now be tested in a similar way. From what we've seen at VMWare's website, Workstation 5 is gonna be even more kewl! Teams Console and Snapshot Manager. Wow! I can't wait :-)