I run VPC 2007 on my Vista business laptop with 4 gig RAM. I use VPC to run windows XP and maintain a VS2003 web project. At first everything was great. I assigned the VPC 512MB and did my work as usual. I also run Resharper and Visual SVN. Lately, the act of scrolling in a page causes the CPU to spike above 50, sometimes near 100. This freezes my machine occasionally and is frustrating. Typing code sometimes does the same thing.
I have experimented with changing allocated memory, disk space, turning on/off the paging file, uninstalling ReSharper and Visual SVN. There should be no reason this thing is slow with all the memory I have on this laptop! I don't have anything running on it but VPC at any one time.
I'm wondering if I should just install VS2003 on my Vista machine and deal with any incompatibility problems.
Any suggestions?
Try VirtualBox.
VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86
virtualization products for enterprise
as well as home use. Not only is
VirtualBox an extremely feature rich,
high performance product for
enterprise customers, it is also the
only professional solution that is
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Software under the terms of the GNU
General Public License (GPL).
If it were me, I'd run the VS.NET 2003 IDE on Vista natively. Just check out this page with the problems you might have:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2005/bb188244.aspx
As far as your CPU goes, it could be a video driver/display issue. Have you tried turning Aero Glass on/off on your vista machine to see if that changes things? Are your number of colors for your desktop the same both in the VPC and on your host? Have you updated your video drivers recently?
I recommend VirtualBox. Every time I use VPC I soon give up because the performance is terrible. I run VirtualBox with a Vista virtual PC allocated 1.5gb ram and it runs really well. In fact I don't really notice much slow down from running natively.
First thing I'd suggest doing is run Process Explorer and Process Monitor to find out whats really eating the cpu. If it used to run fine, switching to another VM might not fix anything.
I'd bet VisualSVN is the problem. I had the same problem on a dual-core system with 6GB of RAM. I eventually just uninstalled it because it kept crashing the IDE.
BTW, I'm running Server2003 64-bit.
You probably have VPC07 runnning the active vhd at maximum speed. Go to options on the console menu and change this setting to divide CPU time equally among all vhd's and your problems will disappear!
Related
I am developing a .NET application, and have the luxury of doing this on a fairly powerful desktop PC. I want to ensure it runs okay on PCs with much lower spec, but I don't have spare machines kicking around and can't really afford to buy them. Is there any way to simulate a lower-spec PC on my current PC, to get a feel for how the software might run?
Any help or advice would be very much appreciated.
*My PC is Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with 8-core Intel i7 and 16GB RAM.
You could install VMWare and install any OS you want, with any hardware specs you want, provided that they don't exceed your current working hardware of course.
Keep in mind that VMWare is just a virtualization layer. It emulates an OS but you are still running your code on the same i7.
http://www.asp.net/mobile/device-simulators Here is an example of several Visual Studio plug-ins that emulate devices. You can also install Windows 8 and run hyper-v. It's great for this kind of thing.
I'd like to ask anybody who has built a virtualized VS2010 environment in VirtualBox or VMware, which one was able to work out of the box without too much tweaking? Or both need workarounds to get stuff working?
Both are fine as long as you install the respective tools and drivers provided for the guest OS
If you're using VMWare Workstation, you can leverage even more out of the environment by installing Visual Studio on the Host PC, and using the Guest VM for debugging, if your application crashes you can actually rewind back to before the crash and step through your code with the same heap and stack before it crashed!
Basically, I suggest going with VMWare Workstation. It's pretty cheap (assuming you get paid to program) and has many, many awesome features that you'll come to love. If you're a hobbyist/student programmer however, you'll likely find VirtualBox to be a little more functional than the free VMWare Player.
As far as performance goes, Intel and AMD both have shipped chips with hardware virtualization since 2005/2006 respectively. This is called VT-x or AMD-V, and often has to be enabled in the bios on older machines.
Basically this means that your BIOS handles Memory and I/O virtualization on this chip, while specialist drivers (e.g. VMWare Tools) are installed to improve graphics and mouse performance - effectively this means the resulting VM has near native performance with minimal overhead.
Hope that helps!
You can work with a VS2010/Windows virtualized environment with no problems.
I've worked with such combination and I had no problems. Both VMWare and VirtualBox are stable so far since years and Windows OS virtualization works properly.
Obviously, you can have performance loss, because a virtualized OS has more bottle necked access to resources than a host one, but current CPUs from Intel and AMD have advanced virtualization instruction extensions which accelerates virtualization operations.
So... Just go ahead!
I don't know your requirement but there is also a great alternative using Win 7.
You can create a vhd file and boot on the vhd file.
A few steps more, you can create a base vhd file with everything you need, mark it as readonly and create as many differential disk as you want.
The drawback of this method are these ones :
it's a bit tricky to create the base and diff disk, because you have to do it in the setup console of windows setup (but google can help you)
there is a small performance impact on the disk I/O (but lower than the visualization environment)
you can run only one system at a time. In fact, nothing disallow you to install a virtualization software
you can't have your "host" and it's potential tools (corporate email, etc.)
but at least, the performance will be greatly better than a virtualization software.
I have a laptop machine with below configuration:
Core 2 Duo # 1.4 GHz
4GB RAM
320GB HardDrive
Windows 7
Whether this is sufficient for installing VS 2010? The speed of processor is 1.4GHz, but in Microsoft website they have given minimum of 1.6GHz processor speed. Can anyone tell from their experience?
Thanks in advance.
Will most likely install, however I would expect it will run slow. Depends on what sort of work you are doing. Small console apps would be OK but I doubt full blown WPF/Silverlight apps would be speedy. Also, if your connecting to a local SQL instance.. etc (could pull an increased overhead).
Sum Up.
Will install.
Work will be tedious.
Another SO post for reference VS 2010 Requirments
The main issue is the way that VS2010 uses WPF; you might find that large files behave a little jerkily in the text editor, but I don't think it'll be un-usable.
I've not tried VS2010, but I do have VS2008 + SQL Server Express installed on a netbook with a few years old Atom CPU and 2 GB of RAM, and it works fine though it's obviously a bit slow. So I'd assume that you'll have no problems since even if the requirements for VS2010 are higher, your laptop is much higher spec than that netbook.
Will work. but might have some performace issues on Editor / Designer. I had a machine with almost similar configuration. used it for silverlight developement. I always has problem in the design preview of the XAML file. - it gets loaded after some time then expected time.
After having had a dev PC HD corrupt, I'm considering the idea of making my development environment be fully Virtual PC based.
The core items would be:
- XP Pro 32
- IIS
- VS2003
- VS2008
- SQL Server 2005
- Office 2003
Primary source would reside on a server in SVN with only a clocal copy on the VPC.
This would be for Windows based web and desktop development.
Assuming that the host machine has decent performance and provides for hardware virtualization, are there any known gotchas with such a setup, ie main pros and cons. Any performance issues or other issues that make this a good or bad idea?
I'd like to go this route so I can create a full backup VPC that can be put on a new PC if one fails and is repalced or copied to a laptop as needed for offsite work, etc. With the new Virtual PC features of Win7 this seems like it may be even better goign forward too.
Would like to get some feedback on this before we go down that road...
I wouldn't recommend Virtual PC because the performance is pretty disappointing compared to VMWare.
I've used a virtual development machine inside VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion on Mac for quite a while, and it works very well. It feels as if you're running on a dedicated machine.
My recommendations are:
Use a 64-bit OS as your host OS (Vista x64, Windows 7 64-bit, Mac OS X Leopord)
Have at least 6GB of RAM on your physical machine
Allocate 3GB of RAM to your VM for 32-bit, or more for a 64-bit guest OS
Pre-allocate the diskspace for your guest OS (no auto-grow)
Another advantage is that you can take your VM from a Windows-based VMWare Workstation to a Mac-based VMWare Fusion (and the other way around) without any problems.
I have been running multiple virtual development environments in MS Virtual PC and Virtualbox for 2 years now. I am doing mostly asp.net applications, some of the solutions are relatively large and use large databases which I also run inside the VM.
My observations based on this:
It is a good idea for exactly the reasons you mention and it works fine. Go for it!
768 megs of ram for the VM is enough, but more is better.
Have a Multi-core CPU.
Install the virtual machine additions for the guest OS. (This is basically like installing the proper drivers for your "virtual" hardware, and seems to be more important for performance than having hardware virtualisation support).
If possible, have the VM disk image on
a separate physical disk from the
host OS.
Use Virtualbox. It's free, and being developed rapidly. It might already be the best.
If you can satisfy the above, performance is no issue. Multiple Visual studio instances, IIS, SQL, Office, works just fine.
Running multiple copies of the same guest OS when it is a member of a domain/AD is tricky. If you need to do this you should read up on the sysprep.exe tool. Basically you can't just make a copy of the virtual disk, you need to take some special precautions.
Virtual PC is very convenient and it was what I used for starters, but I have to say that virtualbox seems to have overtaken it now. It was a bit rough in the beginning but the last few versions have really gotten there.
Virtualbox is fully free, and it has better features than VPC2007 - the main one that made me switch was the support for high resolutions. Virtualbox runs fullscreen on my 1920x1080 no problem.
It can also run virtual PC images, so switching was just a matter of installing virtualbox and adding my existing virtual PC disks to it.
An added benefit is that I can run the virtual images just as easily on my new mac as on the old pc.
The commercial options are not (anymore) worth what they cost, IMHO.
One thing you might have to consider is the lack of support for multiple monitors within the VM. I really like using multiple monitors, one for my source, the rest for all the rest. As far as I know, this is not possible in Virtual PC. Aside from that I can't think of anything that should hold you back, it's something I have been considering as well.
Regards,
Sebastiaan
VirtualBox from Sun is also a good choice. I am writing this from a Vista laptop with a virtualised Ubuntu dev environment.
One thing that Virtual Box is great for is having a seamless mode in which the guest OS application windows are presented as just windows on the host system, with a single common background (you get 2 status bars - one for Windows and one for Linux).
The Z-orders don't interpolate (ie all guest windows appear on the same Z plane in the host Window system, with their own Z-order within that plane) which can make it a bit odd, but you get used to it.
It is particularly useful if you need to build across many environments. VirtualBox is getting better and I now have an OpenSolaris environment and a FreeBSD one as well.
It is free as in beer which can be handy.
I actually run three development environments (and many test environments) under Ubuntu host in Windows guest virtual machines - it's very good for keeping things separated and for being able to restore test environments to a known point. It's also handy since the backup is a simple directory copy on the host and you don't have to worry about recovering settings or re-installing applications. etc.
I prefer VMWare over Virtual PC for both performance and usability (keep in mind that's my opinion). You don't need the VMWare Workstation product to create a VM - check out EasyVMX here for a way to create easy VMs.
The one thing you'll miss though is VMWare tools which only comes with the Workstation product, not the player. But VMWare has this for download here - I'm unsure of the legality of this even though it's an official download from VMWare, you may only be able to use it if you have the paid product.
I actually have a license for Workstation, it's just an earlier version and I prefer the latest Player.
Is anyone using Virtual PC to maintain multiple large .NET 1.1 and 2.0 websites? Are there any lessons learned? I used Virtual PC recently with a small WinForms app and it worked great, but then everything works great with WinForms. ASP.NET development hogs way more resources, requires IIS to be running, requires a ridiculously long wait after recompilations, etc., so I'm a little concerned. And I'll also be using Oracle, if that makes any difference.
Also, is there any real reason to use VM Ware instead of Virtual PC?
I've used VirtualPCs for a few years for development of some fairly hefty web apps without much problem. Lots of RAM is important. I keep my VPCs on an external USB drive and they perform great from there. This gives me the flexibility to take the drive with me if I need to do work somewhere else... just install VPC on a host plug in the USB drive and start coding.
For servers, we use VMWare and have had little to no trouble with it.
Recently I went back to working on my local machine as you lose the benefit of dual monitors with VPCs, and I don't need to be as mobile as I used to.
Virtual PC 2007 is very fast esp on a CPU that has hardware support for VM's. 3GB RAM a must for anything not small. XP makes a good guest OS, Vista works well as a host.
Thanks for all the answers. So RAM is the key.
As far as dual monitor capability, I found that I could use dual monitors, as long as one of those monitors was my actual machine. And that was what I wanted anyway.
Mike
As long as you have the resources (separate hard disk for the virtual machine, sufficient RAM), I don't see why you would have any problems.
If you are going to be using VPCs as a server...perhaps Hyper-V (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_Virtualization) is something to look at.
Its pretty powerful, in how it lets you assign RAM / CPU Cores to a virtualized machine.