December 23, 2013 at 9:42 am
My doctor advised dit;;ching the laptop for a more ergonomic environment.
I code at home now for four clients, and was wondering if it makes any sense to divide the new rig into N virtual machines...maybe a small Linux instance and a windows partition or two.
Is this a worthwhile effort?
Its got 1tb disk and 32 gb ram
Thanks a lot
December 23, 2013 at 10:14 am
drew.georgopulos (12/23/2013)
My doctor advised ditching the laptop for a more ergonomic environment.I code at home now for four clients, and was wondering if it makes any sense to divide the new rig into N virtual machines...maybe a small Linux instance and a windows partition or two.
Is this a worthwhile effort?
Its got 1tb disk and 32 gb ram
Thanks a lot
I would not have a development machine any other way, though I don't use partitions and such. Look into VMWare. You set up a VM on a host for whatever operating system you have and you run the complete OS like an app. The VM's can be configured so that they can see the host. But each VM is its own little world.
I have Win 7 64 as the host and on that I have a Win 7 32 bit VM, an XP VM and a DOS 6.0 VM just for the fun of it. You could have a Linux VM as well. The real beauty comes into play when you have to upgrade your host machine. You copy the VM's from one host to another and you are up and running in a matter of minutes. Regular backups ensure that if your current host gets trashed, reinstall the host, copy the VM's from your backup and you are up and running.
You do have to have the install disks for each OS that you would like to install.
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January 3, 2014 at 9:25 am
I am using VMs all over for many things, especially development. I don't like installing a plug-in or add-on that might break my system, and VMs protect me. I would definitely divide the machine up into VMs. The one caveat to be careful of is the licensing issues you may run into.
I use Hyper-V now because of work requirements. I have friends that love it, but they tend to be more experienced sysadmins. For me, it's cumbersome and I don't love the hypervisor. The tooling isn't well done, IMHO, but I haven't dug in to get more done than I need to.
Personally I'd use VMWare as it's more user friendly. I might set up a VM as my "desktop" with the dev tools I need. Then I might use a separate VM for each client that has server side stuff, like SQL, IIS, Apache, whatever. Deploy to the VM from your client, maybe even have 2 VMs where you move stuff from one to the next.
That way you have separate environments, and you practice moving code from one to the other. That's a valuable skill.
One last note: Use snapshots often. They are great for resetting your environment after you've messed something up.
January 17, 2014 at 12:20 pm
VMWare software is excellent, but I haven't found virtualization software easier to get up and running on a dev desktop faster than Oracle's VirtualBox.
They all have their use cases, strengths and weaknesses.
January 21, 2014 at 8:57 am
benjamin.reyes (1/17/2014)
VMWare software is excellent, but I haven't found virtualization software easier to get up and running on a dev desktop faster than Oracle's VirtualBox.They all have their use cases, strengths and weaknesses.
I haven't tried VirtualBox (VB) 4, but when I had VB 3, I had issues copying/cloning VMs for quick builds. VMWare made this dirt simple and quick, and using snapshots as clones was amazing.
January 22, 2014 at 7:29 am
Definitely a worthwhile effort. I am using host only networking and running a handful of vms on a test domain. It's been extremely valuable
I ran into the same issues that Steve did with the latest virtual box. I wanted to export my rig for other members of the team but with virtualbox it just wasn't happening. When I switched to vmware workstation everything was much smoother.
I am using an external drive to hold my vms which has had problems when the drive is not removed safely.
Why is it that people who can't take advice always insist on giving it? - James Bond, Casino Royale
January 22, 2014 at 8:25 am
sql4gnt (1/22/2014)
I ran into the same issues that Steve did with the latest virtual box. I wanted to export my rig for other members of the team but with virtualbox it just wasn't happening.
Was that using the "File->Export Appliance" facility in VirtualBox? I found that to work pretty seamlessly, myself--all it complained about was a particular targeted network interface not existing on the target machine, but I just selected one that *did* exist and everything then worked fine.
January 22, 2014 at 9:37 am
I was using export virtual appliance, then after moving it to another computer, virtualbox would have issues with the file. I didn't explore it past that because vmware worked right out of the box.
Why is it that people who can't take advice always insist on giving it? - James Bond, Casino Royale
January 22, 2014 at 9:54 am
sql4gnt (1/22/2014)
I was using export virtual appliance, then after moving it to another computer, virtualbox would have issues with the file.
You were doing a File->Import Appliance at the other end? (VirtualBox won't open the appliance file by itself).
January 22, 2014 at 10:26 am
This thread has been an enormous help to me, thanks a ton
long story short, gots to save my nickels and dimes for VMware.:-D
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