Given I actually work on the product, I’m always blowing away Windows/VS/.NET builds and I work consistently in VMs, hosted both locally & on a remote server with 4 monitors.
Some advice: 1) Don’t use Virtual PC or Virtual Server. Hyper-V is now the product to use. 2) Get Windows 8. Hyper-V is now available in client x64 builds. 3) Remote Desktop into the machine, make sure you check the “Use all my monitors for the remote session”, this will cause the thing to span all Windows. 4) Perf is much better using Remote Desktop than something like VNC because session doesn’t need send images, it basically just sends drawing instructions (as if it as was drawing locally). You’ll also better experience if you match OS versions between client/server. 5) Put your source code on a different VHD than the OS. That way, you can simply attach the VHD to any Hyper image if you want to test things on multiple OS’s. 6) On Windows 8, make sure you associate a Microsoft account to your domain login (and ditto to Office/VS 2013) – that way settings roam when you switch OSs. 7) Alternately you can automate the Windows transfers settings infrastructure to save and restore all your settings with the running of a simple command-line. The biggest perf gain you are going to see is to put money into Windows 8 (or Server 2008) and replace VPC with Hyper-V. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Joseph Cooney Sent: Wednesday, October 2, 2013 6:17 PM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: Virtual visual studio development machine – looking for some setup advice This is pretty much how I work (local VMs, one per client/project, or remote VM supplied by the client that I rdp into). Code is checked in frequently and VMs are backed up to external drives so in the event of hardware failure I can be back up and running quickly. On 3 Oct 2013 10:43, "Greg Harris" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi People, I am about to setup a new development machine for a new development project and I was after some suggestions… I want to be able to run multiple separate environments at the same time so that I can test software in these environments and just trash the environment as needed when done. Also, the same idea sounds valid for my visual studio development environment. This would give me the advantage of being able to wind back to a prior known, good stable environment as needed. This would also give some additional benefits: * Disaster recovery when on the road: If I am seeing a client on the other side of the world and my laptop dies, I can go into the local store, buy a new machine and start up a VM on the machine and I have all of my environments back again at reduced stress. * Quickly move to new physical machine as needed to get additional resources. * Separate environment for each project. * Ability to build a VM and send it to the cloud for production use. I am thinking that at any one time, I would be running VM’s for: * Stable stuff like office, file system and database * Development (Visual Studio) * Test environments (typically only one, but maybe more) I realise that I am going to need to give the physical machine a LOT MORE memory and disk (but disk is cheap, probably use an SSD, OK not cheap). The other resources should share well. My guest VPC’s will all be some form of Windows OS (both 32 and 64 bit) hosted on Win 7 Pro 64 bit. The initial concerns I have are around the user interface * UI responsiveness, I have seen on some VPC’s the mouse jitter around and it be unclear where you are pointing, this can be very disconcerting. * I tend to use two or three monitors at a time, the VPC must support this. I am thinking that I will keep as little as possible running on the host OS, so that I (almost) never need to reboot it. I have already found some useful references on the web: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/633774/optimize-development-virtual-machine http://www.andrewconnell.com/HOWTO-Squeeze-Every-Last-Drop-of-Performance-Out-of-Your-Virtual-PCs Before I go and burn a lot of time on this, I wanted to review this with the list… Questions: * Do any of you do this? * Does it work well? * What should I lookout for? * What tools should I use? I assume that the best options available for hosting my VM’s are one of: * VMWare http://www.vmware.com * Oracle Virtual Box http://www.virtualbox.org * MS Virtual PC http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3702 MS Virtual PC is 2011, does that mean it is stable or they have moved on to something else? Thanks in advance for your help :-). Regards Greg Harris
