R – Windows Virtual PC Development Setup

virtual-pcvpc

After having had a dev PC HD corrupt, I'm considering the idea of making my development environment be fully Virtual PC based.

The core items would be:
– XP Pro 32
– IIS
– VS2003
– VS2008
– SQL Server 2005
– Office 2003

Primary source would reside on a server in SVN with only a clocal copy on the VPC.
This would be for Windows based web and desktop development.

Assuming that the host machine has decent performance and provides for hardware virtualization, are there any known gotchas with such a setup, ie main pros and cons. Any performance issues or other issues that make this a good or bad idea?

I'd like to go this route so I can create a full backup VPC that can be put on a new PC if one fails and is repalced or copied to a laptop as needed for offsite work, etc. With the new Virtual PC features of Win7 this seems like it may be even better goign forward too.

Would like to get some feedback on this before we go down that road…

Best Answer

I wouldn't recommend Virtual PC because the performance is pretty disappointing compared to VMWare.

I've used a virtual development machine inside VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion on Mac for quite a while, and it works very well. It feels as if you're running on a dedicated machine.

My recommendations are:

  • Use a 64-bit OS as your host OS (Vista x64, Windows 7 64-bit, Mac OS X Leopord)
  • Have at least 6GB of RAM on your physical machine
  • Allocate 3GB of RAM to your VM for 32-bit, or more for a 64-bit guest OS
  • Pre-allocate the diskspace for your guest OS (no auto-grow)

Another advantage is that you can take your VM from a Windows-based VMWare Workstation to a Mac-based VMWare Fusion (and the other way around) without any problems.