Is it possible using windows 7 or windows server 2008 to create 5 VMWare virtual machines
so that 5 developers can use them using thin clients to work with
Visual Studio 2008/2010 with all components (sql server express, IIS etc).
what can be the options and the hardware specs for server and clients?
I am looking forward for all opinions.
Thanks and Regards.
It's certainly possible as long as you have enough cores, RAM and Windows/VS licenses. I often use Hyper-V for testing different Visual Studio installations, though I haven't had more than 2 running at the same time. I think you can pull this off, but you'll probably want 16GB of RAM and an 8-core processor. I'm not sure what problems you might run into with VMWare, but I think it would work with Hyper-V.
Good luck!
Related
I am trying to find a solution for installing Visual Studio 2010 (VMWARE) and connecting to it remotely so that both i can use the pc and the receiver can monitor what i am doing.
There seems to be so many different solutions for VMWARE and i am little of which will work.
It would be ideal if it was free of charge, i notice the "VMWARE PLAYER" is - but i think is only to run virtual machines???
If anybody has had any success of running VMWARE with visual studio 2010 i would look to hear your comments or any advice
Thanks
EDIT
TO clarify, i am looking to run visual studio 2010 in VM.
In order to run VS2010 in VM you will need:
VMWare Server 2.0
Licenced operating system
VS2010
Follow those steps:
Install VMWare server on the physical host
Create a new virtual machine
Install operating system on your virtual machine
Install VS2010 + any other software you need for development
Connect your VM to internet so it can be connected to from internet (open necessary firewall ports)
On a side note: why do you want the receiver to have access to your development environment in the first place? Won't it suffice to give him access to your deliverables only? If you are developing a web site - publish it and give him access. For desktop apps give him the link to a site where you can dump your nightly builds...
I agree with Jakub, but you could also use ESXi on a system do the same thing and have for a few trade shows I would do the following
1) VMware ESXi, use 4.01 located at VMware vSPhere Hypervisor ESXi
2) Use Microsoft Windows 2008, you can be granted a 60 day license for testing.
3) Install Microsoft VS2010 (in my case it was Microsoft VS2008, its all our group uses.
The only issues I have found are when installing Visual Studio 2008, the OS detection might cause a few issues. VS2010 should be able to correctly detect the OS you are using.
The other testing bed the developers I support use are based around the same thing, but use Xen for the hypervisor. We have found on long haul networks using tunnels, VMware ESXi's remote console sessions can be crazy and produced odd graphical draws and even latency.
Good luck with Visual Studio 2010. And I hope your teams work out.
I recently switched to a MacBook Pro for my development machine (for many reasons). I want to setup a Virtual Machine for ASP.NET, IIS, and Visual Studio 2010 development. I also have need to do some development work with SharePoint 2010.
What I am wondering is if I should use Windows 7 (64 bit) or Windows Server 2008 (64 bit) as the OS for my development virtual machine. I don't really need most of the services running in Server 2008 so I felt that Windows 7 would probably run faster in the VM environment however I am fairly new to SharePoint 2010 so I am not sure if Windows 7 (64 bit) can be used as a development environment for it.
Thanks for any input.
much easier is to install SharePoint 2010 on Win Server than on Windows 7 - on Windows 7 you need to install SharePoint manually (extract installation files, install prerequisites, install additional patches etc). Here is a link how to do it: http://bit.ly/aDCzvS
Services will not make a difference. Look at all the stuff you need for Sharepoint - this is not a low capacity environment. So, 00mb will not make a difference. Between SQL Server, Sharepoint server and Visual Studio I would say you ASK for about 6-8gb anyway ;)
I do not think it makes a difference now. Sharepoint 2010 was explicitly optimized for being installable on Win 7 - and this is a fully supported development model (contrary to 2007 where you basically were at the end of a bad line as developer). Win 7 should be good. That said, you can tune Windows server to be as good as Win 7 UI wise (for development work and playing music in the background).
I would go with Windows 7 for the time being - and possibly install Sharepoint on a separate Win 2008 when needed. THe main problem here is that Sharepoint is heavy in mem useage, and I woud hate carrying it around all the other time.
A MacBook Pro may be a bad choice for that - make sure you have at least 8gb memory for real sharepoint development work.
I work with people that use SharePoint in a VM on a Mac and their life is much harder. Among other things copying and pasting code between the guest and host machine doesn't work, and they're forced to dedicate one monitor to the VM. You should really consider Boot Camp and Windows 7.
Boot Camp + Windows 7 should get you:
Ability to use multiple monitors (Visual Studio's multi-monitor support is really wonderful)
Ability to hibernate (which you wouldn't necessarily get in Boot Camp + Server 2008 R2)
Use of all of your memory (SharePoint 2010 is a memory hog, running in a VM won't help the situation)
Fewer inconveniences like copy and paste problems
If for whatever reason Boot Camp isn't an option I'd go with Windows 7 in a VM. One of the big pros over Server 2008 is it has all of the features that you need already enabled. It ends up being a lot of work to debug why something isn't working in Server 2008 R2 only to find some obscure feature or service wasn't installed or activated out of the box.
I just downloaded the VS 2010 Beta1 Pro and I want to setup a vm to try the new devenv.
Which os and which emulator software should I try for the best performaces? (currently I've XP sp3, Win 7 RC, Win 2008).
hmm....Win 7 or 2008. Though I'd say Win 7 as that better reflects Microsoft's latest dev environment....you wouldn't really do dev on 2008....though you could.
Personally I'd dual boot, especially as Win 7 RC is free, and run it natively.
Otherwise I'd definitely make sure you can virtualize with full hardware acceleration.
this bit of software by gibson will help you identify whether your hardware supports full hardware accelaration.
If it does, obviously you'll need a VM solution which can make use of that, such as VMWare or MS HyperV
As the release date for the public beta of SharePoint 2010 is coming closer and closer, I'm wondering how to set up a developer machine for it. I've heard that for developing on SharePoint a 64 bit system is needed and that Microsoft advises to use Windows 7 64 bit and install SharePoint 2010 on it.
I think that won't be an option for me as I only have one computer here at work and I don't like to install SharePoint on the same machine that I use for my normal office work (email stuff, writing concept papers, ...).
Am I right that I only have two other options? Using Server 2008 as a desktop operating system and install SharePoint 2010 on a virtual machine or using Windows 7 64 and use VMWare to host the SharePoitn 2010.
So I'm wondering if there are any other options and which one you chose? What experiences have you already made?
If you decide to install 2010 on your Vista/Windows 7 machine, make sure you have at least 4GB of RAM (I'd personally want at least 6, if not 8), and follow the instructions from MSDN: "Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server"
Yes, you are right there are only three options:
Install SharePoint onto the OS natively (new for 2010 and aimed at developers)
Install SharePoint into a VM you run on your machine
Get a second machine and install SharePoint on it.
In addition you will need Visual Studio 2010 for the developer experience to be complete.
I would highly recommend trying the install native route as it will provide a great development experience and will run fairly light. Also at worst you can have two batch files, one of which starts and the other stops the services so there will be zero impact except disk.
I am doing some SP2010 development at the moment. I have:
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with Sharepoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 installed, running on Hyper-V. I just connect to it via Remote Desktop. Works a treat. I do all my dev in the VS2010 instance running on the VM, leaving my physical work computer free for everything else. I back up my work using TFS, so if I mess up the Sharepoint install (somehow), I can just roll back to a previous snapshot.
hope that helps. :D
Sharepoint 2010 development takes a lot of hardware resources. You can't use Hyper-V on Windows 7 but if you have the Enterprise version of the OS, you can build and boot directly from VHD, taking normal advantage of hardware resources. To learn how, you can visit this post: http://rambletech.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/boot-windows-7-directly-from-virtual-hard-disk-image/
HTH.
I am updating my rig and I need to make a decision between staying with XP x64 or going to Vista x64. I do very little development, really just building products from my developers. The other 90% of my work is done with Google Apps, Skype, Office, etc...
I want to upgrade to Vista not only because I will have 3x monitors running on DirectX10, but mostly because iTunes isnt' supported on XP x64!
So, my question...
With all the horror stories about Vista, will Vista Ultimate x64 with 8GB RAM be good for my development machine?
If I can't develop on Vista, I can always fire open a VPC to do the development in. No?
EDIT
I am using all Microsoft development tools...
VS.NET 2005
VS.NET 2008
VB6
SQL Server 2005/2008
ASP.NET
(.NET 2.0 & .NET 3.0)
I'm sure the software will run, I suppose I am not so sure that the OS will be speedy enough, or stable enough.
I am fine with Vista 64 bits for .net and php.
A lot of conversation about it are already on SO. Here is some important point your might take in consideration for .Net:
Unit Testing with NUnit
UAC with developpement
VS and Vista
A lot more...
You can develop for X86 on your new X64 machine without problem.
For PHP XAMPP work fine, Eclipse work fine too.
I run Vista x64 with 4GB of memory and haven't run into any major problems. Before this I was using Vista x86 and I definitely like x64 better as it seems more stable.
In case you're curious, with only (hehe, only!? amazing to say) 4GB of memory I can easily run:
3 instances of Visual Studio 2008 with Resharper
a couple Sql Management Studio instances
Outlook with 3 mail stores totaling # 2GB
Firefox with # 20 tabs
a bunch of Windows Explorer windows
Windows Media Player
iTunes (which is slow as a dog)
# 5 Excel and Word documents
plus some assorted services (eg, Sql Service 2005 and 2008) and status-area apps
Even with all this I still have roughly 750 MB free and no performance issues when using the applications.
I run Vista Business x64 SP 1 (8 GB RAM) for one month now. No problems so far. I'm using following software:
Visual Studio 2005 SP 1
Visual Studio 2008 SP 1
TortoiseSVN / VisualSVN
Visual SourceSafe (older projects)
SQL Server Client Tools
Firefox 3.01 + Firebug
IE 7 + Fiddler
Chrome
Red Gate SQL Compare / Data Compare
Virtual PC 2007 SP 1
Notepad ++
SyncBack
RoyalTS (RemoteDesktop Manager)
Skype
Office 2007
I used it for a long time before switching to Windows Server 2008 (x64) - was very good though,
Personally, I found Server 2008 to be a much better dev OS though. Check out this article on converting Windows Server 2008 to smell a little more like Vista.
I personally use Vista Ultimate x64 with 8GB RAM for my development machine. I don't quite have 3 monitors, but my machine is pretty well set up for development.
Vista x64 is great for .NET and Java. Started with 4GB RAM and that wasn't enough (hit 100% sometimes and the machine would slow to a crawl). 6GB is just barely enough. Hitting 95% memory usage sometimes and it slows down a little, but the machine doesn't go into a paging frenzy anymore.
I run Vista x64 Ultimate as my primary dev machine and it's just fine. Support for x64 has come a long way and for the most part you won't notice a difference except for program files location and much, much more RAM.
Vista will be plenty fast and stable. I'm using Vista x64 Ultimate for development #work right now, and have been for some time. I have nothing but good to say about it.
I'd say it depends on what you're developing. The first priority should be to make sure that all of your development and testing tools work properly under Vista x64. If they don't, there's no reason to suffer the pain of doing all your actual work in a virtual machine.
So I'd say the best thing to do is to take the plunge, see how it works, and keep the XP discs around. And should everything work as expected, it would still be prudent to have a copy of XP running in a VPC just for compatibility testing.
You will have to go XP-based Virtual Machine for any development in IE6. It is near-impossible to run that browser in Vista, let alone Ultimate.
Since a lot of government and legacy code base is against IE6, this happens a lot.
I've used Vista x64 as a development machine and have had only a few minor issues mostly related to using third party APIs in Visual Studio 2008. Just remember that if your getting a really unexplainable error within your Visual Studio project while utilizing a third party API - try compiling your app using the x86 CPU flag in your project settings. This has solved a few headaches for me here and there.