[dba-VB] [SPAM] Re: [SPAM] Create and Use a Virtual Hard Disk on Windows 7 and Windows 8

jwcolby jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Mon Dec 3 15:52:52 CST 2012


The bad assumption I think is that you need all that power for each machine being emulated.  I am 
running third party software on 4 VMs.  Faster machines don't make them do their job much faster. 
My "SQL over the web" server runs tiny little SQL Servers interfacing to Access.  As of now the 
requirements aren't huge.  My dev machine I threw 2 cores at plus 6 gigs of RAM.  Which is another 
advantage, if I need more horsepower I just bring the VM down and add a core / more memory.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting

Reality is what refuses to go away
when you do not believe in it

On 12/3/2012 4:01 PM, Doug Steele wrote:
> Arthur, I think you are making one bad assumption - that hardware is 'way
> faster than any VM'.  From a practical point of view (I have to say that
> because I can't be bothered running tests) I cannot tell the difference in
> speed between Windows 7 running on hardware and in a VM (Parallels in this
> case).
>
> For about $700 I just bought a Mac Mini.  That gives me a bitchin' OSX
> system, a bitchin' Office 2003/Windows development system, a bitchin'
> Office 2010 Windows development system, and any other bitchin' computer I
> feel like setting up :)
>
> Doug
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 12:08 PM, Arthur Fuller <fuller.artful at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Ok, maybe I am getting something absolutely wrong here, but I fail to
>> comprehend the VM thing. It seems to me that given the plummeting price of
>> hardware, VMs have no reason to exist. For example, all you need for a
>> bitchin' Linux box or XP box or Windows 7 box is about $500 or less. Said
>> box would run way faster than any VM, and if you have a KVM then you have
>> about 4 or 5 boxes all running at once, and push a button to switch from
>> this one to that one. Granted, there is also the consumption-of-electricity
>> issue to to factor into this, but even granting that, I still don't get it.
>> So let us suppose that I want two Linux boxes, onw XP box, one Windows 7
>> box, a dedicated server, and although I don't yet have the money, a Windows
>> 8 box. The XP and Linux boxes think 2GB is wealth. The Win7 and Win8 prefer
>> a tad more, and the server more than a tad more. But my point is, why not
>> just buy a separate box for each task? We're not talking about huge amounts
>> of loot here. And the gain is that everything runs as quickly as it can!
>>
>> So maybe I'm missing something important here; in which case, please
>> educate me.
>>
>> A.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 5:17 AM, Salakhetdinov Shamil <mcp2004 at mail.ru
>>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Stuart and John --
>>>
>>> Thank you for your comments.
>>>
>>> Yes, I do remember MS DOS Stacker etc. but I have never used virtual hard
>>> disks in MS Windows: I have asked about performance hit because I have
>>> found that when setting a "map network drive" share from VM to a host PC
>>> virtual harddisk it takes some time even to create and save via
>> notepad.exe
>>> a small text file. During that time notepad.exe becomes "frozen". When
>> you
>>> restart VM with "map network drive" share automatically remapped then
>> such
>>> a "performance hit side effect" disappears...
>>>
>>> Anyway I'm going to try using virtual hard disks to keep the source files
>>> and test databases for my customers projects...
>>>
>>> Thank you.
>>>
>>> -- Shamil
>>>
>>> Mon  3 Dec 2012 13:36:06 от "Stuart McLachlan" <stuart at lexacorp.com.pg>:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> I did some testing a while ago with Access  and VirtualBox.
>>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>> There was no appreciable difference when writing  and reading large test
>>> datasets between
>>>>
>>> Access running directly in Win 7 and  running in a VirtualBox
>> installation
>>> with a virtual HD.
>>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>> Certainly nothing a user would notice.
>>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>> Except in one instance where I created a new virtual machine and told it
>>> to create a
>>>>
>>> "dyanically allocated" disk rather "fixed size" - that really slowed down
>>> the initial writes :-)
>>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>> --
>>>>
>>> Stuart
>>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>> On 2 Dec 2012 at 20:28, jwcolby wrote:
>>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Is the average Windows 7 desktop user going to notice the overhead of
>>> reading and writing to a
>>>>
>>>> virtual disk?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> John W. Colby
>>>>
>>>> Colby Consulting
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
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>>>>
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>>>>
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>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Arthur
>> Cell: 647.710.1314
>>
>> Prediction is difficult, especially of the future.
>>    -- Niels Bohr
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