Executive OverviewGuarding the health of their IT production systems has spurred administrators to rely increasingly on the

pretesting of any and all changes that may be planned. Consequently, provisioning of virtual machines

for testing purposes has become very common. These test environments take much of the risk out

of introducing changes to the production system. However, as useful as this approach may be, they

are also contributing to the steady growth of VM sprawl. The growth trend reflects management’s

reluctance to take down these virtual machines after the test they were created for because they are

often complex and time consuming to build. As a result, managing and maintaining the VMs dedicated

to testing have become a significant cost factor.

Impacted by escalating mandated compliance requirements, daily security concerns and the urgent

need to maintain and optimize their production environments, IT managers are forced to devote more

and more of their time and resources to their testing operations and the many virtual machines the

current testing process has spawned.

But there is a bright ray of hope. There is new virtualization technology that brings on-demand

production cloning to the testing process. With this innovative technology, test environments can be

provisioned in only 15 minutes and taken down in moments. Already in use at several corporate sites,

this new technology warrants a close look by IT managers seeking to rein in VM sprawl and gain better

control of their testing programs.

VM Sprawl and Virtualized TestingToday, a growing number of IT departments utilize virtualization software to create servers for testing.

ESX Servers, Hyper-V, XenServer, Virtualbox, OracleVM are among the most popular offerings.

Vendors including VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft and Oracle offer virtual platforms and management soft-

ware which allow a single powerful physical host to run multiple servers and offer rapid provisioning of

new servers without (up to a point) requiring additional hardware. The current generation of software

requires physical server procurement and purposing of hardware with OS, application, etc. to deliver

an application environment to IT end-users. As a result, servers can be provisioned from virtual server

pools, from templates or otherwise, leveraging virtual platforms to allow sharing and re-use of existing

(or already paid for) physical hardware.

Meeting the Challenge of VM Sprawl With Test Environments On Demand

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Consequently, when Development, Quality Assurance, Compliance, or Infrastructure teams need a set

of servers with specific software, or assuming capacity is available, they use one more of the leading

virtualization software offerings.

However, the dependence on virtual servers and the relative ease with which they can be created has

had the effect of increasing Virtual Machine sprawl. Every IT group has its set of virtual machines,

which after a while become indispensable for the group. As a result, the IT department has to manage

an increasing number of servers, back them up, and make sure they are available, responsive and

compliant with corporate polices. While making end-users happy, every un-patched virtual machine

is a liability for IT and the corporation. They cause compliance headaches, potential security holes, and

data and IP leakage. Further, creating, provisioning and taking down these virtual machines can be

labor intensive and time consuming.

This document discusses recently introduced virtualization technology from Kubisys, Inc, what it does,

how it works and how it is being put to use in business.

Addressing the Problem at the Root with Kubisys Thin Capture™

The root cause for VM sprawl is that once a VM is created and utilized, administrators are reluctant to

take it down. They know that at some point they will need it again and they don’t want to go through

the time and trouble of having to rebuild it. So the inventory of stand-by VMs grows and the sprawl

problem worsens.

In addressing the problem the industry has responded in predictable fashion — if you can’t beat the

problem, spend time and money trying to manage it. As a result, a range of sprawl management tools

have been created to help administrators deal their growing inventory of VMs in a better, more

organized manner.

Kubisys, Inc. has developed an approach to VM management and utilization that addresses the

problem at its root. One of the main drivers for the proliferation of VMs is the growing demand for

pre-production test environments created for the purpose of pre-testing software upgrades and system

changes, new vendor software, audit evaluations and mandated compliance updates and patches.

Because untested changes can cause production slowdowns, data errors and other glitches that can

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“ The root cause for VM sprawl is that once a VM is created and

utilized, administrators are reluctant to take it down. They know

that at some point they will need it again and they don’t want

to go through the time and trouble of having to rebuild it.”

result in lost business, testing has become a major contributor to VM sprawl. That’s due to the fact

that in order to conduct meaningful tests for these changes, a variety of test environments that closely

mimic production environments must be provisioned.

The Kubisys Thin Capture solution provides organizations with a way to provision such test environ-

ments in a fully automated manner, on demand, by rapidly cloning the relevant subset of the

production environment. In just 15 minutes, Thin Capture creates the ideal test environment that is

specific to the change you want to test.

Since Thin Capture can provision a test environment so quickly and easily, once the test is finished,

the environment can be released at a click of a button. In this way, Thin Capture obviates one of the

main causes of VM sprawl. If it only takes 15 minutes to provision a test bed, why maintain it? Because

Thin Capture makes it so easy and fast to provision a test environment, there’s no need to hold on to it.

A ‘Thin Replica’ SolutionThe Kubisys Thin Capture is a hardware appliance that allows data center personnel at sites running

Microsoft Windows (and soon, Linux) to create identical thin replicas of one or more production servers

on demand in only 15 minutes. Personnel can then perform comprehensive, in-place enterprise testing

on those replicas without impacting the production environment or requiring any additional hardware

or software for testing. Kubisys Thin Capture technology facilitates the creation of an exact virtual clone

of the production enterprise, while ensuring that no changes are made to production servers, and that

the production servers are unaffected by the testing activity itself.

Thin Capture enables a much more business-friendly and project- oriented approach than the time

consuming and labor intensive task of creating dedicated servers for specific tasks which tend to have

an unmanaged life cycle.

Well-suited to the needs of IT departments of 50-150 personnel, Kubisys Thin Capture provides a fast,

easy and non-invasive approach for pre-testing software upgrades, new vendor software, audit evalua-

tions, mandated compliance updates and patches, and other planned production system changes.

It enables rapid provisioning of multiple clones for troubleshooting and for ‘what if’ sandbox projects.

In short, Thin Capture enables users to test and bring new system enhancements online in a shorter

period of time.

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“ Thin Capture obviates one of the main causes of VM sprawl.

If it only takes 15 minutes to provision a test bed, why maintain it?

Because Thin Capture makes it so easy and fast to provision a

test environment, there’s no need to hold on to it.”

Thin Capture™ Technology Overview

Kubisys Thin Capture is embodied in a 2U form factor orange-colored appliance, with a small LCD

panel and keys on the front bezel used to set the network configuration information of the primary

Ethernet interface of the appliance.

The Thin Capture Process The Thin capture appliance is a next generation automated virtual platform which can be used to create

a set of virtual machines which mirror a set of production servers in the organization. The ‘thin’ part of

’Thin Capture’ refers to the fact that the virtual machines are created together in a very short time in

the appliance, utilizing a strategy of not moving the underlying data. Instead, Thin Capture creates a

data pipeline from the virtual machines in the appliance to the original servers’ storage.

Thin Capture takes an ‘active shadow’ of a set of servers in the enterprise. This means: the virtual

machines running in the appliance are shadows of the production servers. If the production servers

go down or the network connection is lost the shadow servers will cease to function as well.

‘Thin’ is explained when we analyze the salient features of the shadowing process.

The important aspects are the following — users can capture many machines together at the same

time and the virtual machines in the shadow will be up and running in a time span between 5 to 20

minutes. This set of virtual machines encapsulated in the appliance are identical to the set of production

servers, with the capability to communicate over an IP network with each other and with the produc-

tion network via a firewall, which is part of every shadow. The data resides in the original location and

since there is no data movement the system as a whole snaps into life within minutes.

In order to create a ‘thin capture’ that avoids the need for copying the data, the software creates

an instantaneous frozen image of the production servers at a point in time (while the production

servers continue to work) and yet enable treating the point-in-time image as a read-only data store.

Standard Microsoft Windows interfaces like WMI are used to discover the configuration informa-

tion corresponding to a running production instance of Windows, and snapshot technology (Volume

Shadow Copy Service) provided natively on Windows platforms is utilized. The read-only snapshot

maintained in the original storage location is accessed over the network via TCP/IP from the appliance,

where a write caching layer is applied before exposed disks to the virtual machines. This effectively

creates a complete, read-write, secure point in time copy of the storage associated with the production

machine that the virtual machine can utilize. The IP addresses, MAC addresses and other data related to

the network configuration are accurately captured and preserved in the shadow environment.

Other ‘thin’ aspects of the system are; 1) there is no software installed permanently on the physical servers

which are virtualized; 2) there is very little impact on the physical servers while they are virtualized. In addition,

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Applying Thin Capture to Enterprise IT By creating an encapsulated, identical set of virtual machines which can communicate with each

other as a point-in-time image of the enterprise, which can be modified freely without impacting the

originals, and discarded at will, a wide variety of enterprise testing may be accomplished. Users can

make both software and configuration changes to shadow servers inside the appliance without

affecting production, examine the impact of these changes, and repeat or revert as needed.

There are many additional uses for Thin Capture. A large number of enterprises have stringent require-

ments on the uptime and stability of their system as a whole from a service availability and functionality

perspective. Changes in underlying software components often negatively impact system performance.

For that reason it is necessary to ensure that changes applied to enterprise production servers do not

have an adverse effect. This in turn requires implementing those changes based on faith or past

experience, taking steps to determine the impact of planned changes on some sort of a test system.

The Thin Capture appliance is a perfect environment to perform these experiments without any impact

on the production environment.

since the ‘shadows’ are thin, many such shadow collections can be made to correspond to different points in

time and can be configured differently to test multiple alternatives. The discarding process is very ‘thin’ as well

and can be quickly executed leaving no residue behind on the production servers or the appliance.

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The most comprehensive and interesting way to describe the Thin Capture appliance is to describe it as

an enterprise simulator. It is a simulator which can run near identical copies of the enterprise machines

without impacting the business. When running a simulation however, one encounters the problem of

initializing the simulation to the correct initial conditions. The initial conditions for running a simulation

of the enterprise in this case are the clones of the enterprise machines — the machines are set up in the

thin capture appliance by mirroring/copying the states of the machines in the enterprise. What makes

the appliance ‘thin’ is the fact that the copies are made with very little effort. Instead of moving the

data across from the original system to the copy, a pipeline to the original system enables movement of

data as required. This gives rise to a very efficient way of initializing the system.

Once high quality networked connected clones are initialized, users can perform a variety of tasks on

the system and understand the behavior of the real system by looking at the behavior of the simulation

(shadow) environment. Testing the impact of software changes either in the production or in the

“The most comprehensive and interesting way to describe the

Thin Capture appliance is to describe it as an enterprise

simulator. It is a simulator that can run near identical copies

of the enterprise machines without impacting the business.”

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development environment is an important example of what one can do with a simulation engine of this

kind. Thin Capture makes it practical to apply its on-demand provisioning capability for a wide range of

testing requirements including:

• Softwareupgradesandpatches • Newvendorsoftware • Sandboxes • Troubleshooting • Auditevaluations • Training • Mandatedcomplianceupdatesandpatches • Demonstrations • Documentation

In summary, Kubisys Thin Capture can help IT departments minimize VM sprawl while providing time

and labor efficiencies with on-demand provisioning and testbed take down.

Case Study: Thin Capture in a Virtualized Retail Environment Kubisys is used in production as part of the IT infrastructure at a retail operation. Most servers (approxi-

mately 95%) in this environment are virtualized and run on ESX Servers, managed by VMWare Virtual

Center.TheinfrastructurealsousesaSANfromNetworkApplianceforstorage,SymantecNetBackup

fordataprotectionandNeverFailtoprovidehighavailabilityforcertainapplicationservers.Theenviron-

ment is mostly Windows, with some Red Hat Linux, some AIX, some Solaris Sparc and AS400 running

financial software.

At this customer site, practically every production server also had a test version of itself. The management

of these test servers, and keeping them up to date was a major challenge. In addition, the customer

was at the brink of needing to provision even more test servers, to keep pace with their ever-growing

testing needs. Thin Capture completely addressed those needs and helped protect the customer from

falling into the VM sprawl trap.

“ Kubisys Thin Capture proved to be a unique product in this

environment, spinning up a wide range of application environments

on demand for testing, documentation, compliance, auditing

and software deployment, upgrades and rollout.”

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Kubisys Thin Capture proved to be a unique product in this environment, spinning up a wide range of

application environments on demand for testing, documentation, compliance, auditing and software

deployment, upgrades and rollout.

The presence of virtual-

ized testing enhanced

the value of Thin

Capture since IT was

already familiar with the

benefits of virtualization

and was seeking tools

to facilitate an agile

infrastructure.

Kubisys Thin Capture

goes beyond virtual

servers by generating

on-demand copies of

servers (physical and

virtual) with a full

complement of data,

the entire application

stack and necessary

networking glue.

In this environment a

significant investment

was made in a perma-

nent pre-production test

bed. Since the test-bed

went live it has been in high demand from many groups. Kubisys Thin Capture consumes the test-bed

and can spin up copies of either subsets, or the entire test-bed as needed, alleviating bottle necks and

freeing up project waits.

The very pressing need for both constant and ad-hoc testing created compelling value for Kubisys Thin

Capture, which creates test-beds in 15 minutes right off production. In this fast paced retail environ-

ment IT can now react to project needs by supplying just enough infrastructure at a click of a button.

Additionally, Kubisys Thin Capture is a turnkey solution that enables appliance users to be completely

self-sufficient — no additional storage or networking required. Kubisys empowers users with its ability

to create an instant private replicated set of servers at a fraction of the cost and effort of other

solutions. Kubisys Thin Capture empowers users to work at their own pace, not tied to the schedules

of other teams, or to wait for resources (both computing and people) to become available.

This is what the Director of IT at the retail operation said about Kubisys Thin Capture:

“ We have spent three months thoroughly evaluating the Kubisys Thin

Capture and we are very pleased with its feature set. We have come

across many scenarios during our evaluation period where the Kubisys

Thin Capture has repeatedly demonstrated its value by providing

immediate solutions avoiding production system deployment and

operational problems. We are so impressed and pleased with the

capabilities of the Kubisys product that we have opted to purchase

one from this year’s budget and immediately put it to use.

“One of the immediate uses we have is to help us with the PCI

(Payment Card Industry) compliance. We are running a sophisticated

POS system that is mission-critical to our business, and we need a way

to verify if the requisite security updates and patches are completely

compatible with our POS software. With Kubisys Thin Capture, we

are able to quickly test out these types of changes — to see if the

system breaks, and if so determine what is required to fix it.

Without disrupting our production, it gives us the ability to assess

the requirement (need and duration) for production downtime,

and that is very valuable to us.”