Solution-Soft Announces Time Machine® HV for Microsoft Hyper-V

SANTA CLARA, CA. July 7, 2011— SolutionSoft Systems Inc, a global leader in virtual clock and time travel testing solutions is pleased to announce the release of a new product, Time Machine HV for Microsoft Windows 2008 Servers running Hyper-V .

Time Machine HV is the only product on the market that can provide the following benefits to users of Hyper-V services:

Eliminate time-skew issues. 
Physical machines have a hardware clock on their mother board that has a small battery to keep time.  When an operating system first starts it references the RTC (real-time clock) to pull in current real-world date & time, thereafter the operating system either uses its own processes to keep date and time progressing and more often uses a trusted source such as a domain controller to synch time from the network.  Virtual Server software doesn’t have a RTC so it relies on software to emulate one. For each loaded virtual machine.  This can result in significant time-skews between the boot time of the machine and when it sources the date & time from the designated NTP (Network Time Protocol) server or domain controller.

Snapshots or machines in saved state can be started at the last run time. 
The default behavior for Hyper-V senses that a machine is being started from either a saved state or snapshot, and automatically corrects the time in the RTC.  The result of this is that the virtual machines jump forward in time to the date & time of the Virtual Host server.  This happens even if the time synchronization integration service has been disabled.  Once the OS has completed booting the date and time can be set back, but it may have been too late for any testing you needed to do with the system running in the past date.

Run virtual machines with dates into the past or future.
Due to the fact that Time Machine HV is able to override the RTC, you can now run virtual machines into the future. It can emulate the same behavior you would get on a physical machine by disabling the local NTP process and adjusting the RTC in the systems BIOS.  Being able to run virtual machines into the future allows you to do a number of things.

Run a sentinel version of your software:

Simply set the virtual time to three months ahead of the real time and let this machine run with the same code base as you have in production to virtually detect any logic bugs relating to time expiry or date-triggered code.
Fast-forward through date & time application logic:
All versions of Time Machine have the ability to set virtual dates into the past or the future either incrementally or running at a variable speed.  These features allow you jump forward days, weeks, or years at a time or fast-forward through time like one would on a DVR.  Doing so allows you to easily test CRM, financial, or any other date dependent software as you are no longer locked to the date & time of the virtual host.  And because the virtual dates can be set independently for each virtual machine, they each can be set to different dates.
Freeze time:
By locking time, a machine or set of machines can be stopped just short of a critical date event, such as leap-year or leap-second, than allowed to slowly roll-forward as you watch for any software related issues.  Additionally, frozen clocks allow an application to finish processing large data-sets while still marking as completed at the desired virtual time.
Run regressions in past dates:
When a company is updating to new software packages or adding extended processes to an existing system they can use the results from past runs as a benchmark for the changed system/s.  After installing the new application they can simply set a virtual date into the past then re-run the system against their historical inputs then compare the results against their previous outputs looking for any discrepancies.

“As the provider of Time Machine, the premier solution for date & time application testing, Solution-Soft is continually researching new applications and looking for ways to improve our existing products to solve the problems facing today’s testing teams” said Michael Morrison, from Solution-Soft.  “With Time Machine HV users can easily wrap virtual machines with virtual times and thus accelerate their testing or simply overcome any time-skew errors that could cause application down-time”.

About Time Machine

Software Virtual Clocks for Time Travel Testing. Simulate past and future dates effortlessly with Time Machine®, enabling comprehensive testing of your date- and time-sensitive applications. Ideal for validating critical business processes like quarter-end and year-end processing, billing cycles, regulatory compliance (including Year 2038), and policy lifecycles during integration, upgrades, virtualization, cloud migration, and containerization. Eliminate the risks and downtime associated with system clock resets in complex environments like Active Directory and Kerberos.

About Solution-Soft

The Leader in Virtual Clock and Time Travel Testing Solutions

Since 1997, Solution-Soft has been at the forefront of virtual clock software and time travel testing solutions, empowering organizations in the ever-evolving digital world. Our flagship product, Time Machine, has revolutionized application testing, enabling thousands of companies, including 47 of the Fortune 100 US companies, to reduce costs and accelerate project delivery by an average of 3 – 10 times across traditional systems and containerized applications.

The Time Machine Product Suite extends these capabilities, optimizing cloud migration, test automation, Agile/DevOps, and containerization testing. Our latest innovation, Time Machine for Containers, supports standalone Docker containers and large-scale Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters (including a 16,000+ CPU core, 1,300+ namespace deployments).

Trusted by over 2,000 customers worldwide across diverse industries (including 3M, AMEX, BBC, Boeing, and more) and partnered with industry leaders like Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat, Solution-Soft, founded in 1993 and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, provides cutting-edge solutions for your time-sensitive testing needs. Learn more at www.solution-soft.com or call +1.408.346.1400.

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