Balage's Blog

I will not tell you any secret by saying I use virtual machines a lot for testing different support cases I come across. I have used virtualization before but these cases were mostly limited to trying out different Linux / Unix distributions.

Now my job has other aspects. For example if I would like to test the LDAP connection functionality of SCB which is an activity monitoring software I would need a properly set up LDAP server to do that. When I came here to work I was not aware of existing test systems so I started to create my own testing environment. This was not a problem for me, because I like to keep my knowledge up-to-date so installing and configuring these services is a great opportunity for me to learn something new or improve what I have already got.

Anyway, a couple of days ago I started to count my virtual machines because I wanted to wipe out the unused machines and update the rest of them. I was a bit shocked because I counted not less than 18 virtual machines. On a daily basis I use at least one of them, so that system runs all day, but this is not a usual case, most of the time I use two or three different virtual machines at the same time.

I always use a Debian Testing (currently Squeeze) virtal machine which plays a centralized log server role in my virtual environment. This machine is being used for different log sending / receiving scenarios. All of my virtual machines send their logs here, so this machine runs all the time. So I already have one running system.

Let’s see an example. This week I had to test a storage appliance from a third-party vendor. This storage appliance is running in a virtual machine, so that’s the second virtual machine. Unfortunately its web interface only works under Internet Explorer, so I had to start a virtual Windows (I know about ie4linux, but I don’t like it), so that’s the third one. I wanted to use our SCB to make backups to this storage so I booted up my fresh snapshot of SCB 3.1 in a virtual machine, so if I am right then this one is actually the fourth machine so far. Okay, let’s imagine I want to use SCB in cluster mode, so I start another one from it, that’s the fifth virtual machine. And all of them runs at the same time!

Okay I am not crazy, but there are such rare situations, when I need to interrupt my work only for a short time to work on different products of ours, for example on SSBs, so I don’t stop the existing systems because I expect to finish with my second (or third, or fourth… etc ) job as soon as I can, so I fire up my SSB virtal machine. If I am not lucky and I need to do tests in a cluster, then I boot up the slave node as well, so this cluster will present my sixth and seventh virtual machines.

Okay I have to be honest, this scenario happend only once or twice so far, so this is not a usual case. Lucky for me huh?

I bet I could make a contest within the company about who has the most running / installed virtual machines? What do you think, does it worth to run a contest like this?

Maybe next time I will write about the technology and the technical resources I use, but only if you request it, so don’t forget to leave comments.