As I said in my last post, I do not like to do work that could be automated. A large part of the work that should be automated is the work around the build process. More than anything else, successful software development depends on being able to produce a repeatable build process where the code that is built is thoroughly tested, installed and verified before it is considered stable. To get to the point of understanding how this all works, the hardware and network infrastructure is pretty important. So that's where I am going to start.

Hardware

The diagram at left shows the hardware configuration that I have in place. I have a wireless hardware router that is connected to my DSL line to the internet. Connected to that router are several Linksys hubs (there's only one shown in the diagram because it is the only one that bears upon the discussion), and a Netgear 10/100/1000 switch. Why do I have all of these?

Well I have several machines that are unrelated to my work that are connected to the network. All of our entertainment devices (DIRECTV set-top boxes, Playstation, Wii, and Blue-Ray players), my kids' notebooks and desktop PCs, and my wife's notebook are all connected to the network, some via wires and others wirelessly.

The Dell Inspiron Laptop and its companion Dell Dimension Desktop are two older machines (they're both over 5 years old) that I use for all kinds of testing and experimentation. I'm not afraid to replace and reinstall operating systems and software on these machines all the time. The Inspiron Laptop functions as my Linux server when I am presenting and I need a server away from home.

My HP Pavilion notebook is my workhorse workstation. All my blogging, development work, specs, and photography stuff (yes, I enjoy amateur photography in my copious spare time) all happen on my notebook.

One of the most useful and valuable purchase I ever made was the purchase of a LaCie 2Big Network drive. It is a network file store that hangs off the Netgear switch at 1Gb. This device contains all our backups, and acts as a file server for all the other devices on the network. I have a few 1TB external drives and once a week I plug in an external drive and back up the LaCie drive and store it off-site. All the other equipment backs up on to this device so we can always go back to it to restore.

The Dell PowerEdge T710 is a relatively new addition to the network. As I mentioned in my previous post, it hosts the virtual machines that I need to get most of my work done. It has 4 physical network cards that are all connected to the Netgear switch. 

When I first got the PowerEdge I was worried about how much power it would consume. Surprisingly, it is more cost-efficient than the Dell Dimension Desktop, which is why I was able to free up the Desktop. Until fairly recently, the Desktop performed the role of DNS, DHCP server, NIS server and DMZ. That has now changed. The DMZ has now moved onto the PowerEdge and runs in a separate VM. The DNS, DHCP and NIS server now also run in a separate VM and the firewalls are set up appropriately. My network is also segmented so that the personal network and the work network are completely separate.

Virtualization

I have been looking at virtualization for quite a while. When I worked for my last employer, we had a couple of Sun servers that were running OpenEdge AppServers, databases and other software that I was using to diagnose issues with their OpenEdge to Java configuration. I was surprised at how the system coped with the load that I threw at it, even though it was running off the same processors.

When I started work on the Microsoft Exchange Integration project, I knew I was going to need at least 2 Windows 2008 Servers and a couple of Linux boxes. I spent some time with a colleague of mine and discussed the issue and he suggested looking into VMWare again. I had used VMWare Fusion on my Apple Powerbook at my previous employer, but had not really understood how powerful this product really is.

My colleague told me about VMWare ESXi, which is a free version of VMWare that will run on a single machine and allow you to administer that machine as an isolated server. We spec'ed out what we thought I would need for the work I am doing and I ordered the PowerEdge accordingly. When it arrived, I installed VMWare ESXi on it and it has been set up and running now for almost 2 months with no down time.

What has stunned me is how efficiently this machine runs. At any point in time, I have at least 8 machines (3 of which are Windows Servers) running on this machine. The thing that I completely missed out on is how much time the machine spends doing nothing so that there is a lot of overlapping processor downtime that can be exploited. You can easily over-provision this machine and still have it perform very well. 

I'm going to need to spend some money on another 16GB of memory and another 2 TB of disk space, but that is a very simple upgrade for this box. 

The Big Score with Virtualization

The thing that I had not considered about virtualization that has been the biggest score is the fact that everything around the virtual machine management can be scripted. Not only that, it can be scripted from a Linux virtual machine running on the hardware that is running the virtual machine!

Now the reason this is really cool is because of the automation of the build process, and this is where the whole infrastructure discussion culminates.

As a software engineer, I live by the following rule:

 The software does not work until it is packaged, installed, and run on a(set of) machine(s) that is(are) not your development environment.

In other words, the fact that the code works on my notebook does not mean that it works in production. To prove that it does, I have to check it in, have an automated build kick off and build the code, have the automated unit tests run, deploy the code to the test environment, have it run there, and have the tests all pass. Finally, and this is really important for the Microsoft Exchange Integration project, I need to understand how all of this is likely to perform under load.

Building and Installing

With virtualization, I am able to create snapshots of machines, power them up by means of a script, install new software by means of a script, extract the results, power down the machines, revert back to the snapshot, and start again whenever I want to.

By means of one script, I am able to validate how successfully the build ran, and as it is a cron job that runs off my development server on a nightly basis, I have a good build and test report first thing every morning when I get up.

Stress Testing

Moreover, the test is able to use my quiet time to run any stress tests that need to be run. Assuming the build is successful (95% of tests pass, and none of the critical tests fail), the build is stored to the LaCie drive. At 8:00am every morning, the stress test kicks off because this is when the network is likely to be the quietest and the others in the house will not be affected. The script powers down any machines that are not needed during the stress test, starts the stress test machines, runs the stress tests during which time the processors are pegged at 95%, and keeps a log of how the stress tests ran.

At the end of the test (at 4:00pm) it e-mails a report for the tests and reverts to the snapshots for each of the virtual machines after it powers them down. Before it reverts to the snapshot, it copies the virtual machines across to the LaCie drive so that I can always restore the tests and see what the logs looked like if there is any question.

The cool thing about the test ending at 4:00pm is that I normally get the e-mail for stress test on my Blackberry as I am driving out of the parking garage at work, so I know what I am in for when I get home that evening.

The Value of Laziness

The real value of being lazy is that because I won't do repetitive things manually, I have put together a fairly stable build configuration that allows me to prove the code thoroughly before it ever makes it out the door. There are several important things that this process relies on, though.

I have to be ruthless about building tests for each of the new features that I build. This does not mean I believe in Test Driven Development – I don't. Test Driven Development is about building tests and then coding for the tests. I believe in building the code and then figuring out how to break it, and trust me, I am good at breaking my own code.

I have to make sure I add additional load to stress test additional features where I can. This can be really tedious because I spend a lot of time writing code that generates data.

Finally, I couldn't do this without software like Hudson CI, JUnit, NUnit, Apache Ant, NAnt, Apache Maven and most of all, VMWare.

Windows 7

Windows 7 has now been running on 4 machines here at home since I installed it back in November. Three of the 4 are 32-bit machines. The other is a 64-bit machine.

Two of the 32-bit machines are used by my two teenage kids. My son is studying drafting at college and he uses his machine extensively to run various CAD packages, including AutoCAD. He reports that his machine is much more stable now than it was with Vista, which was what his machine shipped with in March last year.

My daughter is at college, too, but her use of her machine will never really show up any major problems. She uses all the standard stuff like MS Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 8. She used to complain a lot about her machine going to a black screen prior to the Windows 7 upgrade, but I have heard nothing new since.

My wife uses her machine for college studies and accounting-related stuff. We run both Quicken and Quickbooks and it all works fine. We have not seen anything on her machine that causes a problem with one exception.

Slideshow Screen Saver Hangs

We have a couple of LaCie 2-Big network drives that contain shared data and backups. Among the shared data on one of the drives is our library of photographs. My wife uses the built-in screensaver that creates a slideshow of photographs onto the display. We have found that this screensaver will work for a period of time, but when she comes back to the machine to start working again, the machine freezes on the screensaver. We have switched to different screensavers and we don't have the problem with others so we are putting it down to that.

I have seen a similar problem on my 64-bit machine with the screensaver, but the difference is that the interface only becomes unresponsive for a period of about 20 seconds. After that it comes back whereas with the 32-bit machine, it hangs permanently.

Other Applications

On my 64-bit notebook I am running a lot of stuff, including Eclipse v3.3, 3.4 and 3.5, Java 1.5 and 1.6, Java EE, Glassfish, MySQL, Visual Studio 2008, DIRECTV Supercast which allows me to watch NFL games on my notebook, and Netflix's video player. Other than the issue with the screensaver, I have had no problem with this machine. It has been substantially more stable than when it was running Vista and I'd go as far as to say that it is more stable than my work notebook which runs Windows XP SP3.

Homegroups

A couple of people asked me about Homegroups and how effective they were. I set up a homegroup expecting that it would simplify things, but all it really does is ease file sharing. There is not a lot of value to it that I do not get from having a central share on the LaCie 2-big drive, so I have switched off the homegroup functionality.

Google Chrome Browser

I installed Google's Chrome Browser on my machine a while ago, but had not really used it. I had been using Internet Explorer 8 and did not really spend much time evaluating it.

A while ago, I was looking for a browser I could use at work. Corporate restrictions had me using Internet Explorer 6 which is not satisfactory. I had previously used Opera, but it fell short on a number of things that I needed it to do. I decided to re-evaluate Firefox and Chrome.

I ended up going with Google Chrome. Chrome is much faster than any of the others. It loads instantly and the first page comes up immediately. Screen-painting is instantaneous. When I compared this with any of the others, whether Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera, there is just no comparison. Internet Explorer 8, for example, takes 3 or 4 seconds to start and another second or two to download my home page which is on my local network.  Firefox is even slower. Chrome is literally instant. The load time is imperceptible.

There are some things, though, that don't work with Chrome. Hosting a web meeting using AT&T's web meeting software does not work, but Webex does. Most plugins work as expected, but occasionally I run into pages that don't and I am forced to switch to Internet Explorer to work around those.

Another big thing with Chrome is that even though I use it on all my workstations, I have never had it crash or hang. I cannot say the same for either Internet Explorer or Firefox.

More than 90% of my browsing is now done using Chrome and it just works. What's interesting is that Chrome is new software and it is more stable than Internet Explorer or Firefox. If this is any indication of what is still to come, I think Google is onto something.

Conclusion

I am very satisfied with the improvements in Windows 7. I would be very happy if I could replace XP on my workstation at work with Windows 7. There are some nice features that I have gotten used to. I prefer the Windows 7 task bar. I also like being able to drag windows to the side of the screen and have Windows figure out that I want the windows tiled next to each other. Mostly, though, I am happier about the stability and I have nothing that I have tried to run that does not work on Windows 7, so I am pretty satisfied with it. I feel like it is generally faster than Vista was, but I could not substantiate that with empirical data, so it is really a feeling more than something I can substantiate.

I am extremely satisfied with Chrome and I am now running it on my Linux boxes as well. It's fast, and it works. It has become my browser of choice.

Machines

We have 4 Windows boxes at home. Three are HP 32-bit notebooks and the other one is an HP 64-bit machine – mine. We bought all 4 machines during the course of this year and all came with Windows Vista. We have had no end of trouble with Vista. The machines work fine, but a lot of applications generate exceptions and hang under Vista that work fine on my XP box. So I decided to believe Microsoft's advertizing (probably a big mistake) that indicates that Windows 7 has been thoroughly tested. 

Preparation

My experience with Microsoft's upgrades have been patchy, at best. So I left this task as the very last task that I would perform before I start class on Monday. I figured on doing a complete reinstall if I needed to. Past exeperience, especially moving from NT to XP, taught me that a reinstall was a very likely possibility. That meant I needed to have everything else taken care of before I started.

I have a lot of stuff on my machine. My local drive has 195GB of programs and data on it. I am fastidious, though, about keeping myself up-to-date with the latest versions of software. This means that I did not need to do much in terms of getting the latest versions of software. Norton 360 does my backups for me so I did not need to do a new backup before I did the upgrade. So once I got the DVD, I could go ahead and install.

Upgrade

I started the upgrade on my 64-bit HP Pavilion Entertainment PC at around 4pm on Friday afternoon. I had to deauthorize my iTunes account as one of the preconditions to the install, but that was the only thing that the upgrade process identified as a potential problem. Once that was done, the process started and ran… and ran… and ran… and ran…

Around 10:00pm (6 hours later!) the install utility asked me for the product key, rebooted, and the upgrade was complete. I immediately did the on-line activation and ran Windows Update to get any updates that were necessary.

Windows Update installed several updates (I believe it was 38) and I restarted the machine again.

All told, the upgrade took about 7 hours, which is an insane amount of time.

Outcome

I spent most of Saturday morning testing everything and I had no problems at all. Now that things have settled down, I am very happy with the upgrade. Internet Explorer is working whereas before it was giving a lot of trouble. My machine is performing much better and all the applications I have installed work properly.

As I write this, I have DIRECTV's SuperCast software running with today's football games streaming and it works fine.

I spent Saturday afternoon and evening upgrading the other three machines. None of them has as much stuff on as mine, so they averaged about 4 hours total for the upgrade – still a lot of time. As with mine, they are all performing better and they have also stopped some of the exceptions that were happening.

Things I like

All four machines are performing better and seem more stable. We're not seeing the exceptions we saw before.

Another thing I was worried about is that I was told that a lot of applications would not work with Windows 7. None of my existing applications are affected by that. Everything works fine.

I like the new task bar. It is more organized and it has some useful options.

Networking with the other notebooks on the network is much easier and I have had no problem doing all the Unix stuff I do from my PC.

Things I don't like

This upgrade took a long time. 19 hours of upgrade time across 4 machines is ridiculous.

I was very frustrated that the Quick Launch toolbar now no longer exists and although you can pin things to the taskbar, none of the Quick Launch stuff was pinned to the taskbar for me. That was a pain.

Summary

For the most part, this upgrade went smoothly even if it took an inordinate amount of time. The machines are more stable than they were before and they seem to be faster. Internet Explorer performs much better and even Firefox is behaving pretty decently.

So far so good. I'll follow this up in a week or two with more on how this goes.