Arthur Fuller
fuller.artful at gmail.com
Sat Oct 1 11:23:56 CDT 2011
My suggestion is to run each of these apps in its own VM, the principle reason being that no bedbugs can clutter any other installation. Thus you can have an XP VM, an Ubuntu VM, a Win7 VM and even a Win8 VM, all residing comfortably within your vast amount of RAM. My suggestion is that you create a VM that exactly mirrors your clients' setup, and do all your development work within that environment. This will (in theory) obviate any possible library-collisions, updates and so on. In practise, I have five VMs at the ready. Two are tailored to clients' in-sutu, with nothing loaded in the given instance but wXP in one case and w7 in the other; the others are devoted to various flavours of Linux. I have no billable clients on Linux but I keep on learning, and I don't want anything I do in any environment to screw up what already works in any given VM. The upside is that everything (e;g; every client's world) is protected from anything stupid that I may do on the base.The downside is that I have to remember all the backups and their schedules; but I am willing to trade off this for that. At the moment, this whole op is relatively trivial: two clients plus me. Perhaps my approach might grow unwieldy, in the face of dozens or hundreds of clients, but for the moment it works, and I can even envision its scalability. It is quite possible that the future shall prove me wrong, and that I shall have to rethink this, someday down the road. But for the moment, which involves a client-base of two, it works so far.