Solution-Soft Announces Time Machine® HV for Microsoft Hyper-V
SANTA CLARA, CA. July 7, 2011— SolutionSoft Systems Inc, a leading provider of Intelligent Data Optimization (IDO) 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
Time Machine is a patent-pending software solution designed to enable testing and simulation of specified system dates and times without modifying or resetting the system clock. The software allows defined applications and users to run under any defined future date, past date or time zone using a virtual clock while the underlying system time remains unchanged. And with the most recent feature added to Time Machine, users can now specify variable speed clocks. This addition allows modifications to virtual clocks to run from 1000 times slower or faster than a real clock. This addition allows modifications to virtual clocks to run from 1000 times slower than a real clock up-to 1000 times faster. With variable speed clocks many interesting simulations can be easily created. For instance using a fast clock, a utility company’s network operations center can replay in minutes the recorded events from a black-out event that normally transpired over the course of days. Or, by implementing a slow clock a financial services firm can create a delay in batch processing while data is loaded into the system.
With all these abilities Time Machine proves itself as a powerful tool for performing "what-if" testing on systems resources and programs. Time Machine’s unique solution for user-based time morphing for UNIX, Linux and Windows Servers allows test environments to simultaneously run up to 20,000 individually defined virtual clocks at once and supports both group and user level time offsets.
When initiating an ERP migration, testing new additions to CRM, performing legacy migration, or integrating new modules to an existing software infrastructure, there are specific logic elements of the project that will need to be thoroughly tested for all conceivable forward date & time values to guarantee that the system will operate as expected in the future. This involves running the applications with actual data through an extensive range of past, present and future dates, and scrutinizing the results for any functional inconsistencies
Time Machine has been has been field proven as an effective tool for comprehensive testing of SAP, LDAP & Kerberos integration (Active Directory Testing), Legacy migrations, Oracle (Siebel or PeopleSoft) roll-outs, Tibco, J2EE applications in WebSphere, Windows .NET applications, and even web-based AJAX programs.
About Solution-Soft
Solution-Soft is the leading provider of Intelligent Data Optimization (IDO) solutions, which address the urgent need for management of business-critical applications and data. IDO solutions facilitate application deployment, automated data compression, secured data transfer and migration that optimize cost, availability, scalability, and performance. The flag-ship Time Machine product is a proven solution for enterprises to ensure mission critical applications such as ERP and CRM to be delivered on-time and within budget. Solution-Soft boasts more than 1,500 customers, including 3M, American Express, BBC, Boeing, CalPERS, Fed Ex, French Telecom, Hewlett Packard, Photronics, State Farm, UMC, and Wells Fargo. Solution-Soft's market presence is bolstered by partnerships with Citrix (Nasdaq:CTXS), FalconStor (Nasdaq:FALC), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HWP), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT), Network Appliance (Nasdaq: NTAP), Oracle (Nasdaq:ORCL), Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and Synopsys (Nasdaq:SNPS). Solution-Soft works closely with top tiers consultant partners around the world in all industry to achieve clients' business objectives with ultimate ROI
Founded in 1993, Solution-Soft is privately held and based in Santa Clara, Calif., for more information visit www.solution-soft.com or call +1.408.346.1400.
Contact:
Michael Morrison
Solution-Soft
408.346.1415
Solution-Soft and Time Machine are registered trademarks or trademarks of SolutionSoft Systems, Inc. Other registered trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.
