Hi all,
After being hit from time to time with some hardware crashes I am thinking on creating a Virtual Machine with Win7, VS, MS-SQL, SF, etc. to have this as my main dev platform.  I am thinking that in case of hardware crash, it should be fairly easy to recover a VM instead of having to re-install all the tools we use all the time.

I use Virtual Machines to test my applications, but never as the main dev environment, is anybody here using a VM this way?

My choice of VM would be VMware Workstation

I would appreciate any suggestions, comment, licensing issues in this regard.

Edhy Rijo

Hi Edhy,

I also have typically used VMs for testing rather than as my primary development system, maily due to performance problems.  I do all my development on a Thinkpad T500 running XPsp3. I use the free VMWARE server to run my VMs.

I recently read an article on Jeff Attwood's blog suggesting that one of the biggest improvements you can make running VMs is to ensure that they are on a different spindle (ie HDD) to the host OS. I created a W7 VM on a USB drive and the performance is way superior. I am planning to install a 2nd drive in my notebook just to run VMs.   

HTH,

Andy

Running in a VM environment isn't the end of the world, but the main thing is to make sure that you have the memory and processing power to accommodate the VM machine.  Recently I have used VMWare 7 which is a great product and supports dual monitors, etc.  This would run client side, but as long as you have a backup of your image you would be good in case of a crash.  This running client side will also improve performance and reduce hardware costs of a big server.

Like anything else, it won't be a good as being 100% local, but in truth, if you have plenty of memory and processing power locally, you most likely will not be able to tell much of a difference.

Hi Andrew, Trent,

Thanks for the comments.

Edhy Rijo