VMWare full-time?
This morning a LAN administrator’s script gone awry rendered my computer at work inoperable. We ended up repaving it. Yeah, this is a pain, but I make it a policy to always expect that my computer will be wiped clean and re-imaged any morning I come in. It’s never actually happened — until today — but it helps me make sure that all my important stuff is backed up. And when I get a new computer or an operating system upgrade, it sure makes the support staff’s job easier: no need to back up everything from my hard drive before doing the installation, since I don’t care if it’s all gone. It also means that I don’t spend a lot of time tweaking my work environment to perfection, since then I might care more than I want to.
But it’s still a pain. It takes time to reinstall everything. There is of course the basic list of what I need to do my job: Java, JBoss, Subversion, Eclipse, VMWare… Also the little things that help make daily life in Windows bearable: Perl, Ruby, Notepad2, UnxUtils, Gaim…
I’m considering setting everything up in a VMWare image and spending all my time inside it. If I burn that image off to DVD every now and then, then getting back up and going would be a breeze.
As we help Cobol and Uniface developers make the transition to Java EE, we’ve found that just setting up the environment and getting them started writing code is an ordeal. A huge ordeal. I’ve been working on a VMWare image with everything they need to get going, tweaked so that everything just works out of the box. I don’t know whether this will have any uptake, but working inside it for a while might give me an idea of how successful it would be. Having two versions of Windows running all the time, though, is not too appealing.
Of course, there’s no saying that it would need to be Windows. I’ve got a development box running Ubuntu already, it would be pretty sweet to use Ubuntu for everyday work. More appealing right now, Sun has just released a developer edition of Solaris, all set up for developers. It includes an AMP stack (think LAMP without the Linux; there are either too many or not enough good names for this). I didn’t think that I had a spare 14 gigs on my too-small hard drive, but now I suddenly do. Yay?
I’ve got to give this some thought over the weekend. Do I want to live inside VMWare? Input is welcome.
23 Feb 2007 Sam
As long as you have the resouces (e.g. hardware, money for licenses, etc.) I think living in VMWare is a great idea.
From being able to create different dev and test enviroments to knowing that burning the image off to dvd/cd means and easy restore, sounds great.
The only downside is how much it will eat up resources and support for the cool new thing might not be there right away.
I use VMware server for demonstration purposes. It’s very handy for that and the testing things you discussed. A problem is that it consumes a lot of memory. This is because I have my base build of Windows which uses memory just to exist, then I run VMware server and put my virtual machines in there. Each virtual machine requires memory for the Windows it runs, plus the app. The memory cost, then, is that I have the extra memory footprint of a base Windows install and VMware itself. Then I have to consider what I call the virtualization tax. This is the I/O and CPU inefficiency imposed by having an extra software layer and is worth attention when performance is important.
You have to look at your computer. If it has an abundance of memory and CPU, then you should be OK to give it a whirl.
Thanks for your input. I decided to bite the bullet and try it for a couple weeks. I wouldn’t quite call what I have an abundance of memory and CPU, but enough that it’s not dreadful. I’ll report back after I’ve lived this way awhile.
One immediate downside is that I don’t think that I can support dual monitors. As it is, with the ThinkPad model I’m using, support for dual external monitors is painfully uncomfortable. In VMWare, I don’t see any good way to do it at all.
On the other hand, I run the email client in the host operating system, so by working in full- or near-full-screen mode (quick view), I can minimize that distraction. I was already pretty good about that, though, so it’s not much of a win.
Okay, off to pay the virtualization tax.
[…] David Berlind’s experiments with desktop virtualization reminds me that I forgot to follow up here on my own attempt to live inside VMWare. […]