Just imagine, if you could take the current production or test system’s snapshot and make your tests, run your test installation or upgrade, or apply a package and test it effects on the system, or change a customization or import a transport request and analyze the results. And, when you’re done, just delete it, and apply it on the real system. And do all those test without need of extra storage, but just your delta changes.
Yes, there is solution for this need today, a ‘Thin Replica’ solution for SAP. It’s called Thin CaptureTM from Kubisys.
The 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. Then teams can perform comprehensive, in-place enterprise testing on those replicas without impacting the production environment or requiring any additional hardware or software for testing.
In short, Thin Capture enables organizations to bring new test systems up and test the enhancements online in a shorter period of time without any additional storage and hardware requirement, which lets them save time and money.
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.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. Thin Capture of the system will be based on the snapshot of the source system and the data still resides in the original location and since there is no data movement the system as a whole snaps into life within minutes.
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, 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.
Applying Thin Capture to Enterprise IT
By creating an encapsulated, identical set of virtual machines which can communicate with eachother 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.
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.
Thin Capture makes it practical to apply its on-demand provisioning capability for a wide range of testing requirements including:
• Software upgrades and patches
• New vendor software
• Sandboxes
• Troubleshooting
• Audit evaluations
• Training
• Mandated compliance updates and patches
• 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 (approximately 95%) in this environment are virtualized and run on ESX Servers, managed by VMWare Virtual Center. The infrastructure also uses a SAN from Network Appliance for storage, Symantec NetBackup for data protection and NeverFail to provide high availability for certain application servers. The environment 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.
