Record and vPlay: Problem Determination with Virtual Replay Across Heterogeneous Systems
type: CreativeWork
description: Application down time is one of the major reasons for revenue loss in the modern enterprise. While aggressive release schedules cause frail software to be released, application failures occurring in the field cost millions to the technical support organizations in personnel time. Since developers usually don't have direct access to the field environment for a variety of privacy and security reasons, problems are reproduced, analyzed and fixed in very different lab environments. However, the complexity and diversity of application environments make it difficult to accurately replicate the production environment. The indiscriminate collection of data provided by the bug reports often overwhelm or even mislead the developer. A typical issue requires time consuming rounds of clarifications and interactions with the end user, even after which the issue may not manifest. This dissertation introduces vPlay, a software problem determination system which captures software bugs as they occur in the field into small and self-contained recordings, and allows them to be deterministically reproduced across different operating systems and heterogeneous environments. vPlay makes two key advances over the state of the art. First, the recorded bug can be reproduced in a completely different operating system environment without any kind of dependency on the source. vPlay packages up every piece of data necessary to correctly reproduce the bug on any stateless target machine in the developer environment, without the application, its binaries, and other support data. Second, the data captured by vPlay is small, typically amounting to a few megabytes. vPlay achieves this without requiring changes to the applications, base kernel or hardware. vPlay employs a recording mechanism which provides data level independence between the application and its source environment by adopting a state machine model of the application to capture every piece of state accessed by the application. vPlay mini…
abstract: Application down time is one of the major reasons for revenue loss in the modern enterprise. While aggressive release schedules cause frail software to be released, application failures occurring in the field cost millions to the technical support organizations in personnel time. Since developers usually don't have direct access to the field environment for a variety of privacy and security reasons, problems are reproduced, analyzed and fixed in very different lab environments. However, the complexity and diversity of application environments make it difficult to accurately replicate the production environment. The indiscriminate collection of data provided by the bug reports often overwhelm or even mislead the developer. A typical issue requires time consuming rounds of clarifications and interactions with the end user, even after which the issue may not manifest. This dissertation introduces vPlay, a software problem determination system which captures software bugs as they occur in the field into small and self-contained recordings, and allows them to be deterministically reproduced across different operating systems and heterogeneous environments. vPlay makes two key advances over the state of the art. First, the recorded bug can be reproduced in a completely different operating system environment without any kind of dependency on the source. vPlay packages up every piece of data necessary to correctly reproduce the bug on any stateless target machine in the developer environment, without the application, its binaries, and other support data. Second, the data captured by vPlay is small, typically amounting to a few megabytes. vPlay achieves this without requiring changes to the applications, base kernel or hardware. vPlay employs a recording mechanism which provides data level independence between the application and its source environment by adopting a state machine model of the application to capture every piece of state accessed by the application. vPlay mini…
author: Subhraveti, Dinesh Kumar
language: English
keywords: Computer science, Computer system failures, Failure Analysis System (Computer system), Linux, Microsoft Windows (Computer file)
date published: 2012
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:44:16Z
provider: Columbia University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Columbia University

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7916/D8SQ96C7