Comments on: Developing in a Virtual Environment

By: Abe

Abe — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:26:06 +0000

Nearly all of zigGIS 2.0 has been developed in a virtual machine (MacOS X host / Parallels+XP VM). Testing the various ArcGIS versions will be done using VirtualBox so that we can easily swap around the VM images among XP (Bill & Paolo) and MacOS X (me). I couldn’t be happier.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:31:42 +0000

@Kevin

I am running a WinXP VM, and a WinServ 03 VM off of an external USB 2.0 drive. So far it is working out well. I only did it because I ran out of space on the servers HD. So, while I waited for I.T. to purchase a new 750GB HD I copied my VMs over to the external drive. I wouldn’t want to use it permanently, but it does work…

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:42:45 +0000

The point by Dan about the USB drives – is anyone running a VM directly off a USB connected harddrive?
I’m probably using 100gigs for VM’s and am curious if anyone actually runs a VM from a external drive….

By: Dan S.

Dan S. — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:56:31 +0000

Count me in amongst the “Loves VM” users. I’ve done all of my development in virtual machines for about 7 years now; initially because I had transitioned over to a linux desktop but had Windows work, but it quickly became apparent that it’s a swiss army chainsaw for development.

Bringing in a new developer on a project? Gone are the hours (or days) spent getting an environment up and running; just give them a copy of it!

Something on a system borked beyond belief, or accidentally deleted a key system file? Roll back to a snapshot!

(List of advantages goes on.)

The speed hit has been noticeable, particularly during contracts where I was writing an ArcGIS Desktop extension that does a rather large amount of data processing; but even then, it’s been worth it and then some. I also miss out on pretty much any animation and 3D; once I upgrade my aging laptop, I suspect that these will work well enough, if at low-end speeds.

At one point I even experimented with keeping a VMWare image of an entire development server checked into Subversion. (I can’t really recommend that, in retrospect…. but if it hadn’t been killed dead by extremely long checkin and update times, it would have been the bees’ knees.)

Data point WRT keeping things from spilling over: despite doing development on tens of extremely different platforms (Win2K up to XP; all flavors of ESRI desktop software; ArcGIS Server and SDE; C#, j2ee, VB/Avenue/etc environments), I’ve not once had to reinstall an OS due to bit rot, ever.

Top tip if you do go this route: Disk space becomes an issue quickly, particularly on a laptop. External USB drive enclosures (ones where you can swap out the drive inside it yourself) are very nice, but carry a speed penalty. I’ve started using an external ESATA enclosure instead — in conjunction with a PCMCIA adapter card, the disk seek and transfer times are significantly faster than even my laptop’s internal drive.

By: Dave Bouwman

Dave Bouwman — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:05:21 +0000

I love VM’s for test servers, and maybe I’m spoiled with my 3 screen setup, but it would be a tough sell to move to developing in an RDP window.

Dave

By: Ben R.

Ben R. — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:03:04 +0000

Beyond what everyone else has said, I would definitely recommend a multicore machine for VM development. Moving recently from single to multi at home, the differences could not be more apparent.

These days I almost always test commercial software trials in a virtual machine first. And I always keep it on that machine if it is especially bad about leaving around remnants of itself after uninstall and it doesn’t need 3D acceleration.

By: AC77

AC77 — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:31:41 +0000

I am running VMWare on my Mac and have have a Virtual Dev machine setup w/ XP and another with Server 2003 and love it. Performance is fine as long as I’m only running one at a time. One of my cores is dedicated to my primary and the other to my VPC with 2GB for each and it works like a champ.

By: Murky

Murky — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:03:43 +0000

I agree with Tim on the disk space–get plenty of it (this is something that I did not do…why would I need more than 2 or 3 VMs?). Well, there’s always a need for another disk image!

heck, yesterday I fired up a PostGIS/PostgreSQL and gave ziggis arcmap tool a go. For me, it’s therapy for when ESRI products frustrate me.

By: Tim Bowden

Tim Bowden — Fri, 09 May 2008 06:59:16 +0000

As a dev tool, virtual environments are great. They provide flexibility just not possible when working directly on the hardware. You can relatively easily build quite complex environments and modify them very easily. Try something that doesn’t work? Splat the image and start again 5 minutes later. As far as I’m concerned, having virtual environments lets me treat my environment the way you can treat experimental code with CSV type systems.

The other big advantage is you can use it to get around SOE requirements. If you want to try a LAMP or Linux PostgreSQL/PostGIS test bed you don’t need to go begging for a dedicated server. Given a decent spec laptop you can start from there for simple setups.

Only points to watch as Paul R pointed out, have much more ram than you think is healthy, and beware of I/O issues. Also have plenty of disk space for storing images and a good naming convention. It’s a bummer having to sort through a heap of old images to find something you did ages ago…

By: Murky

Murky — Fri, 09 May 2008 01:29:40 +0000

I’ve been using Virtual PC ’07 quite a bit and it does the job. I just bought a high-end workstation and loaded it full of RAM & SCSI disks.

I just mstsc into them as do our contractors (over cisco VPN). I think they’ve even done that from within a Virtual PC on their end!!