More Virtualization
07.08.07 - 09:53pm
I did manage to get all but one of our virtual machines finished for MoCo QA in the last week and up to where local QA can get them. Right now, we are using both Parallels and VMWare but sooner or later we’ll have to standardize on one or the other.
Parallels has gotten a lot of good press lately and most of us are working on Apple hardware so it has been enticing to us. Since VMware Fusion is still in beta, we have not necessarily wanted to bet the farm on it. That being said, as most people in the community know if it is something they watch, we do use VMware on a lot of our servers. It would make sense for us to standardize on a VMware-based solution across the board.
If anyone has any thoughts on the pros and cons around that, I would like to hear them.
As I mentioned in my last post, we’re currently working on putting together profiles for test environments. There is a wiki page up about this effort. I’ll be importing a lot of this profile data into virtual machines that I’ve created, using the clean ones as a base. This will allow us to do quick QA on builds in environments that are a lot closer to what Firefox users actually have. Future plans beyond this are pretty open at this point.
One gaping hole in our virtualization strategy is what to do about OS X. Currently, none of the virtualization solutions allow you to work with OS X and Apple is pretty hostile to the whole idea. This makes things occasionally difficult as we sometimes have to either hunt down an appropriate Mac or run test builds on our work machines and hope something really bad doesn’t happen. There is no way to abstract things out. As it is, I’m probably safer testing on Windows XP inside of a Parallels instance if I hit a really bad build because I can always restore back to a snapshot from before the installation. I do wish that there was a supported (heck, unsupported even) virtualization solution for Macs.
You will be missing some weird pre-installed software configuration by virtualizing these. Things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331404
Oh, it is definitely a possibility that we may miss bugs but you can say that about lots of configurations, virtual or otherwise. The bug you gave as an example is unlikely to be found by QA, as a specific bug, because it requires a specific version of Microsoft Visual Studio, if I’m reading it correctly (or at least msvcr80.dll).
Virtualization isn’t really the issue in this instance as much as there is no real way to emulate the variety of environments that the millions of Firefox users have. It is always going to be a trade off.
If you have any suggestions on good ways to approach this, I’d love to hear them. None of this is set in stone by any means.
Couple of things:
– I have it on good authority that Fusion 1.0 is about to be released; I’m pretty sure RC1 either went out the door, or is very close to going out the door.
– You technically can virtualize OS X; there are a couple of hacks floating around on the ‘net to get OS X working in VMware.
FWIW, I’d recommend standardizing on VMware; with the addition of Fusion, there’s no reason that testers should be constrained to using a Mac, and you’ll have the benefit of using the virtualization platform that the rest of us (build/IT) use.
VMWare supports 64bit and SMP and has higher disk performance. Plus it supports things like VMI to get paravirtualized performance when virtualizing recent linux versions. Feature-wise you can’t beat vmware.
Thanks. Those are good points. I think that the standardization with Build/IT is one of the stronger arguments to be made. Consistency across all of the work being done on Mozilla projects is going to be important in the long run.
Preed, I just received a notification that RC1 went out the door today and is now available.
I downloaded VMWare Fusion beta 4 a couple weeks ago, and yesterday I replaced it with RC1. I don’t have a lot of experience with it yet, but based on the experience I do have, I recommend it over Parallels.
Besides the advantages that preed and tglek have pointed out, VMWare has better tools and fewer quirks for Linux. For example, their tools for Linux includes clock synchronization, and Parallels has problems running Ubuntu VMs with more than 512MB of RAM.
I’m in the process of switching from Parallels to VMWare for my own VMs (one of which is my primary desktop).