Akimbi Leverages Virtualization for QA Testing

by Alex Woodie

One of the daunting problems facing development shops these days is the sheer number of different software products they're running--including various releases of server and client operating systems, databases, middleware, app servers, and browsers--and the need to test new software across every foreseeable combination. Silicon Valley startup Akimbi is aiming to alleviate this complexity in quality assurance (QA) testing by using virtualization software that enables QA testers to create and store the different environments, and then pull them up for testing as needed.

QA testing wasn't always so painful. In the olden days of host computing, QA testers had relatively simple environment to replicate during the test process. The client-server revolution of the late 1980s and early 1990s started the increase in complexity by adding various client resources to the mix, while more recently, separating the database from the application servers to create three-tier computing has added yet one more variable.

But things are about to get really nasty, predicts James Phillips, chief executive of Akimbi. The advent of Web services is heralding an age where users don't always know--and, by design, aren't really supposed to care--where the resources of a given application reside. This growth rate of different permutations of products a group must test before giving the green light for production isn't a linear equation--it grows exponentially, he says.

"Putting any application into production requires testing of various parts, including directory management, firewall, identity, and systems management," Phillips says, rattling off a long list of common infrastructure components. "If you think about moving any of those parts, you need to think about testing [all the different combinations]. You get this explosion . . . "

Phillips uses the example of a nearby Silicon Valley company that develops middleware software. "They develop here, and test in Bangalore, India. The developers send over, for example, Build 2330, and they test it against MQ Series 5.1 and WebLogic on Solaris," he says. "The developer, nine times out of 10, can't reproduce the problem. The problem either can't get fixed and shows up in a customer environment later, or the tester spends a day running around, trying to reproduce the problem."

The current QA process is expensive and time consuming, Phillips says. And an additional consideration is the "wear and tear on people spending weekends getting ready for a build."

While there are tools designed to automat the testing process, these tools did not adequately address this problem, Phillips says, so he decided to build a product that did. The result is Slingshot, which the one-year-old company released to general availability in September. He calls it a complex configuration capture-and-restore (C3R) product.

Slingshot works with virtualization products designed for Intel environments, including Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 and VMWare's virtualization software. Any operating system, database, Web application server, message queue technology, firewall, CRM system, job scheduler, Web browser, first-person shooter--any software that's supported on these virtualization products--can be replicated and stored for later use by Slingshot.

Testers interact with Slingshot through a Web browser. Once a QA tester has set up his test environment (something that, for the time being, is still done manually), then he can save that configuration in Slingshot. The next time the tester wants to test a new release against that environment, he can quickly pull up that test environment with just a few mouse clicks, saving time and hassles. Phillips says it's not uncommon for a tester to store thousands of different environments in Slingshot.

Slingshot keeps a list of the actual servers a development shop has for testing processes, and helps the testers deploy the cached environment to the best physical platform. The entire process of selecting and deploying various environments in Slingshot takes 25 to 30 seconds, Phillips says. This is a huge improvement over the hours or days that testers are now spending to provision and configure specific test environments.

In addition to saving QA testers time (which has a direct impact on the overall quality of testing and, thus, development), Slingshot can also save development shops money by eliminating the requirement to buy fleets of actual servers, Phillips says.

Today, the largest development shops are forced to buy servers for testing purposes. These organizations have "thousands and thousands" of servers that are sitting idle 95 percent of time, Phillips says. They're only brought out and fired up when the QA team needs to test a new release against a particular environment that's embodied on that server. By virtualizing those environments into partitions on Intel-based servers using Slingshot, the company can eliminate the need to buy and store those servers, he says.

Yesterday Akimbi announced a partnership with PlateSpin to incorporate that company's OS Portability technology into Slingshot. PlateSpin's software will streamline the initial process of configuring a computer for testing, a process that is currently done manually by Slingshot users.

"What this technology will allow us to do, if you tell me the IP address, I can go capture the state of the machine and turn it into a VHD file," Phillips says, referring to Microsoft's Virtual Hard Disk format. "What's inside of a VHD file is the current state of CPU, memory, storage. It's a frozen, stored, completely re-animatable image."

The OEM arrangement with PlateSpin will eliminate the "painstaking, manual creation of templates and configurations" currently required, Phillips says. The technology will be available in a future release of Slingshot.

Akimbi is currently selling a version of Slingshot (yes, even Akimbi must maintain multiple versions of its software) that includes a copy of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. This special version is available for $995, supports up to two managed CPUs, and includes two licenses for Virtual Server 2005. The deal basically gives you Slingshot and Virtual Server 2005 for the price you'd pay Microsoft just for Virtual Server.

More information on Slingshot is available at www.akimbi.com.