Virtual Systems

[Donone]

I note from various threads over time that some people use VMWare virtual systems. I used it a couple of years ago and it was fine, but networking seemed a little tricky.
I have just discovered VirtualBox from Sun Systems.
Up and running with Vista (which won't run on my host system) without any intervention. Up and running in XP Pro sp2 in no time. No settings, straight through to the internet without any intervention on my part. No bridge to set.
Shared drives with the host without sharing on the host.
It is a dream and simple to setup and use.
ITS FREE.
You might want to try this, if you have half hour to spare, it does it all for you.

[Mike Halliday]

The only issues you will come across when using Virtualised Environments is access to the hardware.

I have used VMWare with XP to test PPL within in it, and YES it does load and you can develop quite nicely with it. (A boon for the Linux or MAC user) but, running anything GFX intensive will not give the desired results.

I would only really use VM sessions for WIN32 apps where there is little or no screen updates. - For this sort of development, VM's are great.

Not sure how games will run ina VM session. Not personally tried that!

The other use I can see for a VM is to run XP within XP with the virtual session having the WM device emulator installed. That way you would have a virtualised smartphone/PDA device for testing without having to own one.

You still can't beat a good native O/S though, when all is said and done VMs are great for testing and development work.

[Donone]

Fully understood, but I can now 'play' with Vista. Not sure why, perhaps the drivers supplied with VBox are more up to date.

[Mike Halliday]

As virtualisation technology matures more it is bound to get to a 99% compatible state. Virtual drivers will get better and soon a lot of the DX10 games may probably work virtually!


The other advantage I have thought of using VM machines is multi user/access testing of your PPL apps.

Ex: Set up a Virtual machine with say, 3 seperate copies of Windows (Licensed of course) - each running your compiled PPL app, on seperate IP addresses, 1 being your server app and the other 2 being your clients. etc etc -This would slow down your average machine, but saves on the cost of 3 new ones! :)

At work I support machines that each host 10 Virtual Windows servers and they have about 6% resources left when running things like Active Directory and SQL server 2005 etc. These are server class machines designed for virtualisation (Hyper V etc) so work much better than desktops when it comes to VMs, but companies would not release VM technology for free if it did not work!

Just my ramblings ...