As described before, I work in IT consultancy and move through various customer environments. It is natural to encounter a variety of security policies, and in most environments we have had to go through a security checklist before authorizating our laptops - our mobile development workstations - for connection into their network (most of the time just development network).
There is this customer who does not allow external computers to connect to their network, so our laptops are.... expensive communication computers with mobile GSM modems. We are forced to use their desktop PCs for development, and those workstations are pretty old models with low RAM and single-core Pentium 4 CPUs and cranky disks. Needless to say, development work is sub-optimal, especially when working with Visual Studio solutions that can range 100 - 400 projects.
For small cases that can be isolated, we develop and test on our own laptops. But for the bigger cases, given that certain development servers like SeeBeyond and mainframe DB2 databases are only on the network, and the prospect of copying hundreds of projects to and fro machines is just ghastly, it does not seem like a technically sound idea.
I am not asking for tricks that violate the customer's policies (e.g. plug laptop in masquerading desktop MAC address). I just like to know what others have tried to retain some of their advantage and efficiency with their own hardware when working in such environments. Whenever I can I try to duplicate the environment with virtual servers on my own laptop, but it only goes so far with Microsoft-only server solutions. Virtualizing non-Microsoft server and software is a challenge.
That's tough. The root cause here is management that doesn't understand that there are real cost implications to their choice of environments.
Your problem is that while you may be billing by the hour, you probably aren't getting paid that way, so your customers' wasted time goes into the pockets of your boss and not to you. A lot of times, this presents a mild conflict of interest. Your company has about zero incentive to speed up your work, and your client doesn't want to make an infrastructure investment in what they see as a temporary engagement.
All I can say is that you have to run this up the flagpole with management. You have to show them that this is taking real time from the projects which could put your deliverable dates at risk, or worse, the reliability of these machines is such that it puts the delivery of the end product at risk as well. The onus is on you to make your management into a believer.
A gig of RAM at Crucial is thirty bucks. If nobody is willing to shell out 90 big ones for 3GB of RAM for your box, you have management that's actively working against you or does not respect you. If it comes to that, you've got bigger problems and need to look for your next employer.
One of the things that I did when I upgrade my current development environment was find links to productivity studies that showed how much productivity increased when the development environment was enhanced. In my particular case it was going from 2 to 3 monitors on my desktop. I was able to find 3-4 articles that described how much was gained by having the extra monitor. It seems self-evident to me that you'd want a newer, well-configured system for developers, especially since the cost of the hardware relative to the cost of the people is so small these days, but the bean counters often think differently. If you can go in armed with some industry studies that show productivity gains, I think it will be harder to dismiss your concerns as just complaints about the environment.
FWIW, I was disappointed to have to do the research for an upgrade that cost less than what the department would spend on paper in a month, but sometimes you have to do things that make no sense to you because it makes sense to someone else.
Write a decent proposal to your manager, that's about all you can do to rectify the solution. If he is unwilling or unable to fix the problem, or unwilling/unable to pass the proposal up to someone who can, then I'd say the current situation is what they've decided to use.
In that case, either live with it, or don't, ie. move on.
The proposal should contain:
A proposal for what you want done
Why it should be done
The consequences of doing it
And most importantly, the consequences of not doing it
List things like longer development time, or less testing, or less time to write quality code. Basically, a minor upgrade that doesn't cost much will improve the quality of the product tremendously.
I just went through this and found a pretty good solution : get a different job
Just synchronize incrementally. You're not typing that much code/second a gsm connection cannot keep up with it? Make sure your projects are setup to use mocks/stubs whereever possible.
Setting this up probably is beyond the capability of the systems administrators of your customer.
The dependency on the big databases should be reduced so you only need to run daily regression tests.
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We are building software intended to communicate with 100's or 1000's of PCs. Unfortunately we do not have the means to set that many devices up. We don't have that many physical devices, and we don't have enough infrastructure to support that many virtual devices either. We are looking to test with high volumes of PC's, combined with other factors such as network latency. Are there services or other ways we can achieve this level of testing?
There are cloud load testing services out there that might do what you want. A few I know of off hand are LoadStorm and Load Impact. Quite a few others will turn up with a search for something like "cloud load testing". This could be an easy option. There would be some cost, but it wouldn't be too high.
If you want to roll your own solution for free, a lot of infrastructure-as-a-service providers offer a free tier for new users. Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure both offer 750 hours of their smallest instance a month for free. While this is usually used for a whole contiguous month of server time (24 hours * 31 days), you could also use it to spin up 750 servers for an hour, once a month. Spread them across all the different regions/data centers available to maximize variance in networks and latency.
You could also consider writing a testing tool using a language with good concurrency support, or with a light footprint, so that you can fire up several hundred threads/processes at once, and then run your tests on relatively few servers. It wouldn't be quite the same as 1000s of different IP addresses all at once, but 4-5 servers each fielding a few hundred clients might be enough to satisfy your testing needs.
Are there any advantages what so ever to form a cluster if all the nodes are Virtual machines running inside the same physical host? Our small company just purchased a server with 16GB of Ram. I propose to just setup IIS on the box to handle outside requests, but our 'Network Engineer' argue that it will be better to create 3 VMs on the box and form a cluster with the VMs for load balancing. But since they are all in the same box, are there actual benefits for taking the VM approach rather than no VMs?
THanks.
No, as the overheads of running four operating systems would take a toll on performance, plus, I believe all modern web servers (plus IIS) are multithreaded so are optimised for performance anyway.
Maybe the Network Engineer knows something that you don't. Just ask. Use common sense to analyze the answer.
That said, running VMs always needs resources - but you might not notice. Doesn't make sense? Well, even if you attach the computer with a Gigabit link to the Internet, you still won't be able to process more data than the ISP gives you. If your uplink is 1MB/s, that's the best you can get. Any VM today is able to process that little trickle of data while being bored 99.999% of the time.
Running the servers in VMs does have other advantages, though. First of all, you can take them down individually for maintenance. If the load surges because your company is extremely successful, you can easily add more VMs on other physical boxes and move virtual servers around with a mouse click. If the main server dies, you can set up a replacement machine and migrate the VMs without having to reinstall everything.
I'd certainly question this decision myself as from a hardware perspective you obviously still have a single point of failure so there is no benefit.
From an application perspective it could be somewhat tenuously suggested that this would allow zero downtime deployments by taking VMs out of the "farm" one at a time but you won't get any additional application redundancy or performance from virtualisation in this instance. What you will get is considerably more management overhead in terms of infrastructure and deployment for little gain.
If there's a plan to deploy to a "proper" load balanced environment in the near future this might be a good starting point to ensure your application works correctly in a farm (sticky sessions etc). Although this makes your apparently live environment also a QA server, which is far from ideal.
from a performance perspective, 3 VMs on the same hardware is slower
from an availability perspective, 2 VMs will give higher availability (better protects from app software failures, OS failures, you can perform maintenance on one node while the other is up).
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It's budgeting time and Corporate is balking at the cost of replacing a coworker's machine who is due for it, needs it, and deserves it.
Our group is a small ISV/SAAS that exists as a division of a larger media group. We are not a cost center, we make money, even this year. We are owned by a mid-size media group whose business model is quite different, and seems driven only by reducing costs.
Our software stack is Visual Studio 2008, SQL 2008, on Windows Server 2008 (so that multiple root websites can be hosted and debugged on each dev's machine). Our target hardware is 3GHz quad-core workstation, 4GB RAM, and RAID 1 mirrored hard drives so that we are protected against the productivity loss of losing a developer hard drive.
Corporate wants to give us a couple powerful, but hand-me-down, decommissioned servers, and then each developer would have a virtual workstation on that server. The computers sitting on our desktops would be dumb terminals at $400-500 each.
I'm trying to be neutral but I doubt it's hard to discern my bias. I'd like to see real developer reactions to this, and I figure this is the best place to get that.
Please include arguments for or against, evidence if you've seen this tried and how well (or not) it has gone.
This sounds like a well intentioned idea, but:
In my experience you need multiple cores, lots of memory, and fast disks to be productive in today's modern IDE's. I don't see that happening in a virtual environment with any economy. Individual boxes are still better.
It's also an issue of control. In a virtual environment I can imagine all kinds of restrictions. Will you still be able to install your own tools, for example?
Ultimately, it's misguided. If this idea increases build times by any substantial amount, any savings in hardware will quickly be erased by lost productivity. Conversely, money that is spent on decent individual machines for developers will quickly pay for itself over and over in reduced build times.
Good quality individual machines are an investment, not a cost.
Development is disk-bound, i.e. you spend your time waiting for builds which is a disk-bound process most of the time. If you're all sharing a machine build times will become much worse.
Aside from all of the givens (perfomance, disk space, etc...):
I would be OK with this as long as I still had multiple monitor support.
Without that, it is a no-go.
Basic failure to understand what a developer box is actually doing much of the time:
When building its chewing through processor and disk - especially disk.
When testing you're talking about having one or more instances of Visual Studio running (once you get past two things start to get interesting), database server, website/services plus all the other stuff (browsers with a lot of tabs open, notebook software, and heaven only knows what else) all spread across multiple monitors (at least two). Lots of cores, lots of memory please!
I can quite happily accept that there's an argument for virtualisation - a good dev box should be able to host multiple, concurrent VMs in order to isolate some of the above and to provide "clean" environments for testing. Note that that's the box for ONE developer hosting multiple VMs solely for the benefit of that one developer...
Our team is developing on remote server (no GUI stuff, plain old vim) for quite some time without problems. Granted it requires rather powerful server and sometimes is starts to be bit on a slow side if everyone start to compile at the same time.
But as a bonus you are very mobile in terms where you can develop from (we all are having laptops) be it in office, home, sunny beach (last one was probably overstatement).
Bute yeah, that might not all work well for graphics heavy apps of course.
It sounds like your group is not offering the solutions that you have considered in a well documented format, otherwise corporate would not be shoving decisions down your throat. If you have a documented process for development, corporate might want to discuss changing the process with you, but as soon as you say, "this change would break our process and we would have to retool our development workflow", they will see the pain of the $$ in reworking the process and most likely back off. That said, once your process is documented, you should internally be ruthless about trying to make it more efficient and cost effective, and have an open mind about corporate's suggestions.
I assume you have machines already for SVN / TRAC, your Continuous Integration server, product demos, testing, etc. and that the only possible use your team could make of these servers is for personal VMs.
I do many things that peg my processor at 100%. Compiles certainly achieve this. Now imagine having to share that processor with 10 other developers. The loss in productivity will become quite apparent. If you have a multi-core PC, this won't be as painful. Get an Intel i7 and you probably won't even notice it when 8 people are logged in. Most programs (including my compiler) can't use more than 1 processor anyway.
That said, it's a viable solution to reduce costs. I used to work at a company who has since switched to these dumb terminals. It works fine. My university had HP UNIX machines that were dumb terminals. They logged into a server that split up the processor ownership among however many people were logged in. What people would do is log into a server and check the number of people logged in. If there were too many, they'd search for the next one, because build times are noticeably slower. I'd never log into the easy to remember server names. =)
It definitely works, but also reduces productivity due to longer build times, especially when multiple people are building at the same time. Since productivity is such a difficult thing to quantify, it might be hard to argue your point.
Graphics acceleration might also be an issue if you need to do anything with animation, video, or image editing. You can't really test video playback through an RDP session since the framerate and/or color depth isn't high enough.
Regardless of performance, at my company we are moving to laptops as developer machines. The main advantage is that developers can bring their computers to meetings, conferences, etc. Also being able to sit next to a colleague when you're helping him with a problem, and having your own development environment available, is very valuable.
Our network team is thinking of setting up a virtual desktop environment (via Windows 2008 virtual host) for each developer.
So we are going to have dumb terminals/laptops and should be using the virtual desktops for all of our work.
Ours is a Microsoft shop and we work with all versions of .net framework. Not having the development environments on the laptops is making the team uncomfortable.
Are there any potential problems with that kind of setup? Is there any reason to be worried about this setup?
Unless there's a very good development-oriented reason for doing this, I'd say don't.
Your developers are going to work best in an environment they want to work in. Unless your developers are the ones suggesting it and pushing for it, you shouldn't be instituting radical changes in their work environments without very good reasons.
I personally am not at all a fan of remote virtualized instances for development work, either. They're often slower, you have to deal with network issues and latency, you often don't have as much control as you would on your own machine. The list goes on and on, and little things add up to create major annoyances.
What happens when the network goes down? Are your dev's just supposed to sit on their hands? Or maybe they could bring cards and play real solitare...
Seriously, though, Unless you have virtual 100% network uptime, and your dev's never work off-site (say, from home) I'm on the "this is a Bad Idea" side.
One option is to get rid of your network team.
Seriously though, I have worked with this same type of setup through VMWare and it wasn't much fun. The only reason why I did it was because my boss thought it might be worth a try. Since I was newly hired, I didn't object. However, after several months of programming this way, I told him that I preferred to have my development studio on my machine and he agreed.
First, the graphical interface isn't really clear with a virtual workstation since it's sending images over the network rather than having your video card's graphical driver render the image. Constant viewing of this gave me a headache.
Secondly, any install of components or tools required the network administrator's help which meant I had to hurry up and wait.
Third, your computer is going to process one application faster than your server is going to process many apps and besides that, it has to send the rendered image over the network. It doesn't sound like it slows you down but it does. Again, hurry up and wait.
Fourth, this may be specific to VMWare but the virtual disk size was fixed to 4GB which to my network guy seemed to think it was enough. This filled up rather quickly. In order for me to expand the drive, I had to wait for the network admin to run partition magic on my drive which screwed it up and I had to have him rebuild my installation.
There are several more reasons but I would strongly encourage you to protest if you can. Your company is probably trying to impliment this because it's a new fad and it can be a way for them to save money. However, your productivity time will be wasted and that needs to be considered as a cost.
Bad Idea. You're taking the most critical tool in your developers' arsenal and making it run much, much, much slower than it needs to, and introducing several critical dependencies along the way.
It's good if you ever have to develop on-site, you can move your dev environment to a laptop and hit the road.
I could see it being required for some highly confidential multiple client work - there is a proof that you didn't leak any test data or debug files from one customer to another.
Down sides:
Few VMs support multiple monitors - without multiple monitors you can't be a productive developer.
Only virtualbox 3 gets close to being able to develop for opengl/activeX on a VM.
In my experience Virtual environments are ideal for test environments (for testing deployments) and not development environments. They are great as a blank slate / clean sheet for testing. I think the risk of alienating your developers is high if you pursue this route. Developers should have all the best tools at their disposal, i.e. high spec laptop / desktop, this keeps morale and productivity high.
Going down this route precludes any home-working which may or may not be an issue. Virtual environments are by their nature slower than dedicated environments, you may also have issues with multiple monitor setups on a VM.
If you go that route, make sure you bench the system aggressively before any serious commitment.
My experience of remote desktops is that it's ok for occasional use, but seldom sufficient for intensive computations and compilation typical of development work, especially at crunch time when everyone needs resources at the same time.
Not sure if that will affect you, but both VMWare and Virtual PC work very slow when viewed via Remote Desktop. For some reason Radmin (http://www.radmin.com/ ) does a much better job.
I regularly work with remote development environments and it is OK (although it takes some time to get used to keep track in which system you're working at the moment ;) ) - but most of the time I'm alone on the system.
When selling a software package that requires hardware, typically dedicated hardware (could be a VM), the buyer typically has to buy the server it will run on. So the total cost of ownership (focusing on the capital expense) includes the hardware in addition to the software.
For example, a $3000 bug tracking package might need a $1500 server to run on, total cost is $4500. The hardware is 50% of the software cost, or 1/3 of the total cost.
Of course, with open source packages, the ratio is inverted.
So the question is: does it matter? At what point does hardware expense affect the sale of the software?
Why require hardware at all?
If hardware prices are a big breaking point in your sale, perhaps offer a hosted solution and factor the price into this service.
"Software As Service" might really help you makes some sales for customers with limited infrastructure.
The ratio depends on which part of the equation is the commodity part.
If you are selling a software targeting solving complex problems like air traffic control that can run on any servers, you might want to sell it packaged with the hardware for a bit more, but since the hardware is the commodity and can be obtained from other vendors, the price ratio will be heavily skewed towards the software.
If on the other hand you are OEM and your goal is to sell your hardware, you can use the software as the commodity to bring more value to your offering. For example, you can sell high-endserver machines and add a preconfigured LAMP stack to make your offering better. In this case, the price is heavily skewed towards the hardware.
"typically" - that's an assumption.
And the cost can be more than just hardware and software if there are service or renewal fees involved. This can be true of open source as well, because a lot of companies like to pay for indemnification and services.
If you buy hardware plus operating system, the decision to go with Windows or Linux comes into play.
I doubt very much that there's a meaningful, fixed ratio. It's an interesting question, though. You'd need a LOT of data, and I don't see that it's been gathered into one place.
I had another thought in a comment below that's worth surfacing. There's another consideration that's becoming more important all the time: power consumption. Some corporate data centers can't add a new server without retiring an old one or by reducing power consumption some other way. Being able to deploy a new software purchase on an existing server is big plus. If it can be virtualized, even better.
So it's not always hardware and software. Other economic considerations, like power cost, have to figure in.
I have found that hardware costs rarely affect the decision.
Small companies can get away with reusing servers.
Large companies already support clusters of servers, increasingly with VM capability so it's easy for them to deploy/redeploy software to as much hardware as necessary.