The Console

VMware's Executive Blog

Wed, 21 Jun 2006

Posted by Dan Chu
Senior Director Developer and ISV Products and Technology Alliances

The Virtual Software Lifecycle: VMware for Development to QA to Production

In the two days since I began to write this blog, we've had tens of thousands of downloads for VMware Server and VMware Player – adding to the millions of downloads of these products since their market debut (February 2006 for VMware Server beta and October 2005 for VMware Player). These are unheard-of download rates from an infrastructure software standpoint – virtualization has really become mainstream. Importantly, most of these downloaders have never used VMware software before!

Further, we are finding that the leading usage for VMware Server is development and test. More than 52% of 12,000+ VMware Server users that we surveyed indicated that development and test is their primary use case. Just as the newly released VMware Infrastructure 3 transforms static farms of servers, software, storage, and networks into flexible resource pools, VMware Workstation, Server, and Infrastructure together transform the software lifecycle of development, test, and QA for millions of users.

Every IT and development organization shares a similar software lifecycle – development and test environments are eventually deployed as production environments, which iterate back into dev, test, and QA, the cycle repeating itself with every release. I hear the same issues from every organization: There are a huge number of development and test environments – in many companies, 2-3 machines in application development and test for every server in production is the norm. Moreover, processes are overly manual and too resource-intensive – for a typical development organization, the overhead for setup, provisioning, and teardown for test/QA/development environments accounts for more than 50% of time expended in the entire development and test cycle!

These issues are driving what has become a consistent request from our customers and systems engineers: they'd like to see VMware streamline and optimize the various stages of the software lifecycle, with capabilities such as automating and managing operations for a specific stage (e.g., testing), as well as processes that span stages, such as configuration capture and management.

At a Customer Advisory Council earlier this year, our customers repeatedly described the need for virtual machine libraries, automated and self-service provisioning, and dev/test workflow leveraging virtualization. For example, a senior IT architect from one of the largest media companies in the world expressed these needs at a customer feedback session, repeated himself at dinner that night, and then told me again when we saw each other two weeks later. Our customers know what they are talking about, and they're passionate about it!

The Virtual Software Lifecycle

Akimbi

At the same time, we've heard from customers who use VMware solutions across their software lifecycle that the new capabilities from Akimbi Systems provide a perfect complement. The director of IT at a global retailer told me that the Akimbi capabilities for virtual lab automation were a great bridge from their use of Workstation for developer desktops to their broad use of VMware Infrastructure (including ESX Server and VirtualCenter) for their production applications.

While working on our software lifecycle capabilities internally, we've also been working with Akimbi for more than a year (Akimbi was a Technology Alliance Partner and participated in and leveraged VMware's Community Source program). Most importantly, their technical leaders – in particular Wilson Huang, Akimbi co-founder and VP of engineering – spent a lot of time with our senior engineers, gaining a sizable amount of mutual respect in the process. We also think very highly of James Phillips, CEO of Akimbi, whose vision and understanding of the software lifecycle matched up very closely with ours.

With this shared respect and vision on both the technical and business sides, combined with the clarity of market demand, we agreed to join forces. Last week we announced that VMware acquired Akimbi. The Akimbi team will join with ours – and move south a couple of Highway 101 exits to Palo Alto. We are especially excited about the key leadership roles that the Akimbi founders will play: James will spearhead VMware's overall dev/test and software lifecycle business, and Wilson will lead and drive our R&D efforts focused on the software lifecycle. It promises to be an exciting and eventful summer - and beyond!

Let us know if you have thoughts about or interest in this solution.

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