Laptop Rebuild: Virtual PC for *ALL* Development?

I'm close to rebuilding my Dell Latitude C840 laptop, after buying a new 7200rpm Hitachi hard drive.  With this build, I'm seriously considering installing just the basics on the laptop (Office, Firefox, Project, WinZip, BlogJet, SharpReader, etc... and Virtual PC).  Then, I'm considering using VMs for my development environments (VS 2003, VS 2005, etc...).  I like the idea of having a low-serviced build on the laptop, and allowing the VMs to do all my design/development work.  I'm not doing much mobility development (issues with mobility/emulator in VPC/VMWare), so that shouldn't be an issue.  For me, when the laptop takes FOREVER to load up all the services related to development, when I want to simply check email, is a pain! 

For all my VS 2005 work, I have a "LowPowerMode.bat" batch file, which executes a bunch of "net stop" commands against many of the services installed on my machine (SQL, MSMQ, etc...) just to free up enough memory to run VMs well (I have 1 GB installed).  In addition, I am running VMs on other physical hard drives (not the install drive), which should help performance as well.

My questions for you: 

Are you currently running all your development in VMs?  If so, are you happy with the performance?  OR do did you try it and had to revert back?  Any specific issues that caused problems?

5 Comments

  • I have a Dell with a 7200rpm drive and 1GB of RAM. I have been working this way for several month and I am fairly happy with the process. As a consultant who works on several projects, being able to have different configurations for servers works very well. They only problem is when you have to update a tool across several images.



    And my hard drive (60BG) doesn't have enough room to easily manage more than three or 4 images at a time.



    Oh, and VPC doesn't deal with the large ISO files that are coming for VS2005.



    And VPC doesn't take advantage of my wide laptop display.



    There's probably a few more warts, but overall it's worth it. ;)

  • It's interesting to see people doing this. I would like to try this out but I have some questions first. In terms of performance, which one is best for having a VM with a development IDE + SQL 2000 + IIS, VPC2004 or Virtual Server 2005? Also, I am doing some development with MS Speech Server and I need my USB headset to test out the programs. Can USB devices transparently connect with the virtual machines too? Thanks.

  • I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 with 7200rpm hard drive and 1GB of RAM (processor speed does not seem to matter). I get quite acceptable performance with VMWare, but not at all with VPC (the same happened on similarly equipped desktop machine). Mainly because of memory, you cannot run more than 2 VM at the same time - running a server and client OS along with your host OS is barely doable.

    It is GREAT for moving targets like Whidbey CTP (or any other CTP for that matter) - I have prebuilt images that I simply unzip and I'm ready to go.

  • Invest in VMWare. Virtual PC might be free if you have MSDN, but it's has a VMWare 2.0 featureset, constantly thrashes the disk and managed memory very poorly. For example I have a machine with 2Gb of Ram in it. I created 3 Virtual PC images with 512 Mb of ram on each one. Virtual PC wouldn't even let me run it. VMWare didn't care and they all ran just fine.



    Sorry I like Microsoft alot, but it's pretty clear they bought Virtual PC to build a server product out of the technology, not to support a desktop client.

  • Scott,



    Yes, I use VPC for all of my development. We used to use VMWare but had later decided that VPC was better and it was free since we had our MSDN subscriptions. This has saved us LOTS of cash on development machines as well as test boxes. For running my whidbey builds, I use VPC as well. I keep a back up of the virtual hard drive and if something pukes, I just restore. Simple as that. I've been doing this for almost 3 years now.

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