Musings

Well, some news on the VQManager.. These are quite exciting days of development on the VQManager. The Beta release, which has the Cisco Skinny protocol support, has been a big hit now. There are lot more leads/prospects for this new beta than the existing VQManager 5.2. This is, in a way, what was expected. Going by the interest shown in the recently concluded Cisco Networkers show, I'm all the more optimistic and excited about this new releases. We have added lot of cool new UIs and major performance boost to the system, it should be a BIG hit with the users. One of the major enhancements includes the UI performance improvements. The pages now loads lightning fast and it does provide a very good feeling using the product. These are the last few stages of the development and we have to undergo the painful rigmarole of validate, prioritize and bug-fix cycle. This is a inevitable, painful cycle for any product release. But this is the MOST important phase of the release cycle too. Th...

One of the interesting issues that I have resolved of late has been making the VQManager work in the Virtual Ethernet environment. For starters, the VQManager is a sniffing based application that relies on the packet capture functionality of the underlying kernel. Typically the VQManager sniffs ethernet packets, decodes them. The sniffed packet follows the order of Ethernet headers->Ip Headers -> UDP Header -> Payload (SIP/RTP etc.,). But in a Virtual ethernet, this packet format is a bit different. A Virtual Ethernet, as the name suggests is a virtual interface of the computer. Typical virtualization softwares (like VMware, OpenVZ, Virtuzzo etc.,) provides these options. Ie., the applications are NOT exposed to the 'real' Ethernet but a 'virtual' layer on top of that. Now, why did this Virtual Ethernet thing create issues with VQManager? Well, as mentioned earlier, the VQManager expects the packet to be of the order. In a virtual ethernet environment, the Eth...

What gives you pleasure from product development is that many people are finding it useful. In fact, that gives greater satisfaction than, say, solving the most complex technical puzzle in the product itself. There have been many instances of VQManager being used and it was always from our known customers (people who have bought it!). So, it was a pleasant surprise to see some one mentioning the product in an external forum . Hope to hear more such news from our users! Btw, if you are one of them using the product and finding it useful, please share your views on the same.. You can share your feedbacks by dropping in a line to our support mail id (support [at] vqmanager [dot] com). We're quite eager to hear user feedbacks/inputs all the time!