StackSafe and the Permeable Sandbox

Most products designed to help organizations use virtual machine software as the foundation for development and testing create a "sandbox" or encapsulated environment for systems and functions. While this approach has several advantages, a recent discussion with StackSafe highlighted a few issues it creates.

First of all, StackSafe would point the obvious, datacenters are veritable computer museums. Furthermore, they are owned and managed by a number of internal organizations. The organization's IT department supports complex production infrastructures with components that can’t be imported into a sandbox. This includes mainframes, midrange machines running UNIX or some vendor's own operating system, and industry standard systems running Windows, Linux, UNIX or Lord only knows what. It also includes SANs, special networking environments, Data warehouses, server farms and many other components outside of the IT organization's direct control.

StackSafe has added the following features to address the issues it sees, in the newest edition of Test Center. Here's what's different:

• A Permeable Sandbox -- Test Center now enables connections between internally networked hosts with externally network infrastructure components
• Outbound Connectivity -- Test Center allows imported Test Center hosts to connect to external infrastructure components
• Inbound Connectivity -- Test Center allows external infrastructure components to connect into Test Center
• Customized Control -- Test Center provides settings to control inbound and outbound connectivity

Does this really address the issues created by a complex, politically charged environment? At best, it's a partial answer. Being able to bring external resources into the testing and development environment is an important feature. Adding these features to a product does little to make a political football, such as the organization's datacenter, easier to manage because many non-IT related issues will always exist.

Other companies, such as Racemi, Scalent Systems, Surgient, VMLogix and VMware are also working hard to create development and testing environments that better reflect the "real world." Companies such as Skytap would suggest that the best approach is to take testing out of the datacenter and "put it in the cloud."

When one considers the pressure IT organizations face to keep all of their software up-to-date, working 24x7 and to deal with regulatory requirements, some sort of solution is clearly needed for medium and large organizations. This capability clearly needs to be part of an organization's IT budget and strategic plan.

Is the approach suggested by StackSafe the best? What do you think? Each organization, in my view, needs to review what its doing, its own requirements and then make an informed choice.