Mendel’s record/replay demo seemed to attract the most attention.
During Mendel Rosenbloom’s keynote this morning they demo’d a
feature that was pretty cool. This was the concept of recording a VM’s
activity and then being able to replay it.During the demo they used MS paint to dray a picture while they
recorded the VM. They then “replayed” the VM and we watched it replay
exactly what had just happened. Naturally watching MS Paint wasn’t that
exciting, but it was nice thinking about the other possibilities.Think of a test/dev cycle. The application tester could record his
test and allow the developer to watch exactly what happened. In the
world of sales, you could record product demo’s and jsut replay the VM.
While nothing was officially announced, Mendel did demonstrate the idea
of using the virtualization layer to capture or record a stream of
execution by a virtual machine (VM). This stream of execution could
then be replayed against another VM, which he demonstrated using a
prerelease version of VMware Workstation 6.0. This has immediate
implications for OS forensics, but I also see tremendous implications
in BC/DR (business continuity/disaster recovery). Think of the idea of
a VM running on a virtual infrastructure in one datacenter, with a
stream of execution on that VM being shipped across to a hot standby VM
in another datacenter in an entirely different city. It’s like using
SAN replication between geographically separate datacenters, but
includes real-time changes to memory state and CPU activity—not just
disk changes. That’s very exciting stuff. The possibilities of what
could be done with that kind of information are almost endless.
