As VMWare 6 Goes into beta 3, the most awaited feature and a tester dream comes to reality. To capture, record and replay EVERYTHING that happens to a VM. This is not a movie recording, but more of a runtime execution and state recording. You can play back a recorded instance (say a list of scripts or operations) any time and many times you like.
The only think i dislike about it is the amount of space it takes (a gigabyte for every two minutes of recording), but again this feature is very experimental and one can hope a more cleaner solution in the coming builds.
chipx86 describes the feature and its usage as:
“What is this good for? Well, have you ever tried testing a program only to encounter a bug that you just can’t reproduce? Maybe there was some memory corruption that happened under some specific case that you just can’t seem to diagnose. Or maybe it’s a network packet that came in in some form that your application didn’t expect. Under normal circumstances, you’d have to do a lot of guesswork in order to find out what exactly happened. Far too often, it’s just too hard to reproduce the bug and it goes unfixed for some time.
Now imagine instead that you’re testing the program in Workstation and, before your testing, you hit Record. You attempt the test and the program crashes in some weird manner. No problem. Hit Stop and replay the recording. Just before the crash occurs, stop the playback and attach a debugger. Messed up? Didn’t find the cause? Replay that recording again.”
The new beta also shows a virtual battery for laptops showing the battery life :). Im also found the introduction of VNC for remote control.
happy virtualising.
