I have already talked about the new Replay Debugging functionality that is now a part of VMware Workstation 6.5 in my previous article (”Replay Debugging: The Future of Software Development“). I truly do believe that this represents the new way that things will be done in the years to come and we will look back on the way we do things today and wonder why. But, there is more pieces to the big picture of how VMware will be creating the software development platform of the future.
VMware’s Lab Manager 3.0, in my opinion, is one of the coolest, and most well thought out products that VMware has on the market today. It positivley solves a specific need in development shops to provision machines that fit seemlessly into the QA and Development processes. Someone in QA can identify a bug, recreate it on a VM (which is a linked clone of a gold environment to mitigate resource sprawl) and create a link to that machine in that state and include in the bug reporting environment or send it directly to the developer. It is one more way to create a sustainable development environment in which everyone is looking at the same thing.
Now, if you take that and connect the dots, it’s not hard to see where the natural evolution should and hopefully will be here. Replay Dubugging is great, but today it’s offered as a proof-of-concept of sorts in Workstation. Workstation is great for development, but not as much for managing the whole process. Image a fully integrated environment that would allow users on ESX running Lab Manager to create replay debugging sessions, send links to these sessions directly to development, and then the developer could just as easily connect the Replay Debugger interface directly to the ESX environment and see exactly what happened. Now, THAT, is the future of software development in a virtual environment. Excited? Me too. In hearing from some of the engineers from VMware at VMworld a couple weeks ago it sounds like this vision is on their radar.
