Building a Demo Server - Part 3
Introduction
In the first two parts of this series, I looked at how to build a demo server (part 1) and how to move data between your live systems and the demo system (Part 2). I didn't come up with great solutions, but looked at pros and cons of doing things a few ways. In this article, I'll present a couple creative and unique ways that I have seen of presenting demos, which involved database servers and resulted in more consistent and smoother demos.
VMWare
VMWare is a virtual machine emulator that allows you to essentially run a complete computer as a process on your Windows or Linux desktop or server. This product is developer by VMWare and they can do a much better job of explaining the product than I can. I did write a review a couple years back as well.
So where does the demo come in? Well, lots of people have started doing seminars and demos from their laptops, but within a virtual machine (VM) rather than using their own software.
What's the benefit? Well, let me describe how one client used this and it should make more sense.
I had a client that I was working with who needed to demo their software. This particular software ran on laptops and allowed sales consultants to work offline out in the field and synchronize their changes when they returned to the office. The particular time when I was assisting them, they needed to demo an upgrade from Access to MSDE along with the new version of the software for clients.
The initial testing done in house showed that the upgrade process was a little shaky and needed work. However the sales team was very interested in getting a jump on sales since the software was so close to being ready to release. Upgrades worked well with the software on Windows 2000 Professional when there were very few applications installed, but not with Windows NT or with other VB apps installed.
The easy solution was to put only Windows 2000 Professional and Office on the sales laptops and let them demo the upgrade. The sales team wasn't too thrilled about a new Ghost image after every sales call and quickly nixed that solution.
Fortunately, I had already implemented VMWare in the QA department to allow them to very quickly setup test environments using a scripted file copy. We decided to roll this out to the field in a similar way.
Each sales laptop received an installation of VMWare over Windows 2000 Professional. This allowed VMWare to run as any other software package on the sales person's laptop. Next we created a VM session in QA that included Windows 2000 Professional, Office, and the old version of the software running Access. This virtual machine runs as a window and looks like you have a terminal session into a Windows Professional desktop. The neat thing was that the host machine CD drive, floppy drive, network card, etc. are all accessible from the VM session. So it's like you have two machines running inside your desktop.
We then shut down out VM session and copied the file from the QA desktop to each sales laptop. Next we created a new VM on each laptop that had the same file size dimensions as our QA VM. A short VBSCRIPT file was also created and placed on each sales person's desktop. When they clicked this script it copied the base VM (copied from QA) over the top of the VM file we had created on the laptop.
A short training session showed each salesperson how to boot a VM and shut it down as well as upgrade the software. Then before each sales call, the salesperson would run the script and boot the VM and then suspect their laptop by closing it. When they arrived at the client, they would open their laptop, resume the base OS session, which included the VM, and then put the new CD in the drive and perform the upgrade. When they were finished demoing the software, they could return to the office and run the script, resetting their VM. As a result, every demo was consistent and very predictable.
And, as you might expect, sales increased with smoother and more consistent demos, and, as the sales people loved, less wasted time on their part fussing with software.
Conclusions
An interesting way to handle demos, albeit on a small scale. This was a creative solution that implemented local demos on each laptop, something that could easily be done with SQL Server Personal Edition as well to maintain consistency.
I'll be looking at some other demo solutions in the next article that I've implemented or seen implemented and I'd love to hear about any that you readers have seen as well. As always, I welcome feedback and please rate this article.
Steve Jones
©dkRanch.net February 2003
