Building a dedicated visual studio 2010 virtual machine, which path has least resistance?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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!

Answer 2

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!

Answer 3

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.