Managing Virtual PC Images with SharePoint Development

I have a lot of Virtual PC images. A lot. Like 20+ just for SharePoint development alone. It seems excessive, but there are a lot of configurations I need to suport (https vs anonymous vs workgroup) as well as various sites we host at work (several SharePoint based applications, a few portals and a couple of Enterprise portals in development for 2005/06). On top of that, I have a few setups that are the SharePoint 2003 / Visual Studio 2005 experiments (which are pretty ugly at this point). Managing all these images is a bit of an issue and even at 5-10gb per image, a 200gb drive fills up pretty quick.

I stumbled across a nice post by Jan Tielens on Virtual PC images and differencing. Something I hadn't done before as all my images are built from scratch. This is not only time consuming in the construction (and something a trained monkey or a well-written NAnt script could do) but they're time consuming to copy around when you need something "almost" like that image but not quite. There is a nice walkthrough blog here on Matt Hausmann's site that gives you a nice visual guide on building difference images.

So after spending a dozen hours or so butchering my SharePoint images, I've reduced my VPC files from 180gb down to 25gb with the same number of images. Pretty slick and creating a new one takes about a minute. I highly recommend you take a look at this for your own VPC image management if space or time is a concern. Now onto my Visual Studio images. Sigh.

Okay, so this post wasn't really a HOWTO on managing Virtual PC images but hey, it's something to blog about.