Question

I m trying to establish a best practice for Virtual Machines for developers. Currently we work on Windows 7 with Visual Studio 2008. However, we need to experiment with VS2010 and to do this we create Win7 VM s and load what we want in there.

My technique is to create a new VM, in this case a Win7 VM, and once it s gone through all it s updates etc. take a copy of it for the next time I need the same type of VM. I used one copy to test in and then eventually abandon or delete it once I ve made it unstable enough and go back and make a copy of the original. However, I find that there were lots of small utilities and enhancements that I d made to the previous working VM that I had never installed in the virgin VM and have to install all of those again.

I m looking for a best practice in using VM s for software development.

Answer 1

VMWare has a great snapshot manager that lets you move non-destructively through a VM snapshots tree. You can take snapshot at point A and then advance the VM to point B (another snapshot), revert to A and advance to C (snapshot C). Then start a new sub-tree in a non-destructive manner at any of those points. You can also clone a VM and flatten multiple snapshots to a single snapshot as well as delete intermediate snapshots and prune branches on the tree.

It s very intelligent how it handles snapshots. I used Virtual Box when it only had linear destructive snapshot reversion -- I understand that VBox has improved but VMWare still has it beat for snapshot capabilities.

Also, if you re debugging in a VM, VMWare has extensions to record a VM s execution for debugging as well.

Answer 2

Given that you aren t able to keep things ordered and have a list of enhacements (the ideal thing to do IMO), why not simply have two VMs, one where you work, and the other virgin . Then, when you or anybody else does an enhancement on your work VM, it has to be replicated on the virgin VM. Next time you or anybody else installs a new copy of the VM, after some iterations you ll have the perfect virgin version .

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