[AccessD] VM dev machines

Mark Breen marklbreen at gmail.com
Sun Sep 12 06:21:56 CDT 2010


Hello John,

I have been playing with VM's since Virtual PC 2004.  I love the concept and
I have nearly 1 GB of various versions and flavours of VMs.

On my main machine I customarily keep a library of preconfigured machines
Win2k3, 2k8, xp, vista, Win7.  But I keep also versions of the following

2k8 with SQL Server 2008
2k8 with SQL Server 2008 R2

Win2k3 with SQL Server 2005

win 2k3 with SQL 2005 and IIS

etc etc


What I want to let you know - and this is just my experience - is that the
performance of these VM's is fine for testing a concept, or even working for
30 minutes, but using Remote DeskTop, I find the UI experience to be
somewhere between bad and dreadful.  There is a lag, quarter or half second,
nothing to worry about then you are remoting in to check something, but I
could not use it for regular work.

I have a win7 machine that I use for PhotoShop work, and while I am glad I
do not have to install PhotoShop, it is pretty slow.
I recently installed balsamiq on the Win7 machine also and found the lag to
be annoying.

I had really hoped I could have a dev machine with just the basics installed
but I found that my main machine, with 20 - 50 applications is still a more
pleasant UI experience than a spotlessly clean vm machine.

Note, I am only complaining bout the UI experience here, I would be happy to
use any VM as a backend db server or iis server.

BTW the machine that I am running these on has 12 GB ram, and is a 2.66 i7
processor, and I am allocating 4 GB ram to the VM, so there should be enough
HP in there.

My suggestion for your laptop is

1) ghost it
2) backup up everything
3) re-installed Win7 or XP which ever you prefer
4) install the bare minimun of applications
5) you will have a lightening fast machine

6) optional:  I would love to know how it will perform if you refuse to let
MS apply any updates.  I feel that after I apply the updates my machines
slow down.
7) optional2:  would you be brave enough to use it with no av, no spyware at
all?  I would not but I do want to try that some day also.

Mark



On 12 September 2010 00:11, Doug Murphy <dw-murphy at cox.net> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> I use VMs for hosting the different versions of Office and to set up
> Client/Server pairs if I have a client app that runs agains a server
> backend. I use Vmware Workstation which allows you to set up Teams. In my
> case a Team consists of the client app development environment and the
> Server side on another machine. When you open a team they both fire up with
> network connections in place. For one situation I have SQL server 2000
> running on Windows Server 2003 (which is the Clients set up) and the Front
> end running on Windows XP with Office 2007. I really like this capability.
> I
> probably have 10 different VMs, any of which can be cloned to create a test
> environment or some unique setup. This has been really powerfull for our
> situation.
>
> We sell 2 runtime products built in Access. I have virtual machines set up
> with different combinations of clean OS's and OS's with different versions
> of Office on them to test our installations on. VMs have been very
> productive for me.
>
> With all the discussion of Lightswitch I am thinking of building a Windows
> 7
> VM to put Lightswitch and Razon on.
>
> Doug
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
> [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby
> Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2010 2:57 PM
> To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving; VBA
> Subject: [AccessD] VM dev machines
>
> Is anyone doing development primarily in a virtual machine? Anyone using
> VMs
> to test against specific environments - Windows XP, Office 2000 etc?
>
> I have a dual core Dell laptop that is beginning to feel long in the tooth,
> though it is less than 3 years old.  I think it is just the old "too much
> crap" syndrome, but I am wondering if I could move into a VM, perhaps using
> XP as the OS and even though it would only use one of the cores, it might
> just be more responsive.  Or maybe not.
>
> I do know that a new laptop is not in the cards any time soon.
>
> --
> John W. Colby
> www.ColbyConsulting.com
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