Testing on Multiple Platforms with VMWare

Tuesday, 27 November 2007

Whilst testing on multiple platforms is important, it can be difficult to obtain access to machines running all the platforms that you wish to test on. This is where virtualization software such as VMWare comes in handy: you don't need to have a separate machine for each tested platform — you don't even need a separate partition. Instead, you set up a Virtual Machine running the target platform, which runs on top of your existing OS. This Virtual Machine is completely self-contained, running off a virtual hard disk contained in a file on your real disk, and with a virtual screen which can be shown in a window on your host desktop.

Virtual Networks

This can be incredibly useful: not only can you test on multiple platforms without repartitioning your hard disk, but you can have multiple virtual machines running simultaneously. If you're developing an application that needs to run on multiple platforms, this can be invaluable, as you can see what the application looks like on different operating systems simultaneously. It also allows you to test network communication — each virtual machine is entirely independent of the others, so you can run a server application on one and a client application on another without having to build a physical network.

Get Started with a Pre-built Virtual Machine

VMWare have a repository of pre-built virtual machines, that they call "appliances". This makes it very easy to get started, without all the hassle of installing the OS. Some appliances even come with pre-installed applications — if you want to try a Ruby on Rails app on linux, then the UbuntuWebServer appliance might be a good place to start.

Warning: Virtual Machines use Real Resources

It's worth noting that the resource use (CPU, memory, disk space) is real, even if the machines are virtual — if you run a CPU-intensive application on your virtual machine, your system will slow down; if you give 3 virtual machines 1Gb of memory each but you only have 2Gb installed, you're going to see a lot of swapping. Virtual machines are not full-time replacements for physical ones unless you have a server with a lot of resources. That said, if you do have a server with a lot of resources, running separate systems and applications in separate virtual machines can make a lot of sense: the individual systems are completely isolated from one-another, so if one application crashes or destroys its (virtual) disk, the others are unaffected. Some web hosting companies use this facility to provide each customer with root access to their own virtual machine, for example.

It's also worth noting that if you install a non-free operating system such as Microsoft Windows, you still need a valid license.

Alternatives

VMWare Server is currently a free download for Windows and Linux, but it's not the only product out there. VirtualBox is also free, and runs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX. One nice feature that VirtualBox has is "seamless Windows": when running Microsoft Windows as the guest operating system, you can suppress the desktop background, so that the application windows from the virtual machine appear on the host desktop.

Another alternative is QEMU which offers full-blown emulation as well as virtualization. This allows you to experiment with operating systems running on a different CPU, though the emulated hardware can be quite limited.

Posted by Anthony Williams
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Tags: testing, vmware, virtualization, virtual machine
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