SuperJason’s Personal Blog

When I get my new computer, I’m considering running everything in VMWare. I’ll install my base operating system on the host machine, and then run a development virtual machine. It would be pretty slick because if I needed to reboot “my machine”, I could keep the other virtual machines running.

I would probably keep 128mb ram free for the host machine. I would give 512-768mb to the development machine, and I would give the appropriate amount of memory to other machines. I have 2gb of RAM, so it should be alright. I looked at getting 3gb, but there was a $700 difference in price.

Pros

• I can move my development machine around if I needed to. If I was going to be working home for an extended period, I could take my development machine home.
• Can use the “Snapshot” feature to try out new software, and then roll it back to the snapshot state.
• Machine having problems? Only reboot the one that is having problems.

Cons

• Speed issues? I haven’t really done any side-by-side performance testing of Visual Studio 2003 in a virtual machine. I would probably give the virtual machine a partition on my hard drive.
• A virtual machine can not take advantage of both processors as far as I know (4 if you count Hyperthreading).
• Memory issues - I could never fully use the 2gb of memory for development, but I could get close if I needed.

Note: I would probably also have some virtual machines running on Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. We just have a preference VMWare where I work. And yes, I am fully licensed for both.

Has anyone done this or thought about doing this? I have a development virtual machine started, so I’ll probably do some benchmarking on it.