Hi Greg, I work remotely in Melbourne from our head office which is based in Perth.
My daily work environment is via VPN, RDP to a virtual machine hosted in Perth on Hyper V Windows 2008 R2 server. I too thought the RDP environment would be an issue with lag but surprisingly it has not been an issue. I think because all the resources (Testing Servers, Web Servers, SQL Servers etc) are based in Perth and the Perth office has a decent Upload and Download bandwidth there is not any issues. I use development tools (Visual Studio 2012 etc), Web browsers, and email clients all without issues. Where you do find an issue for RDP is video content, Adobe Photoshop and Balsamic Mockups. For these tasks I use my local machine. RDP also works great with multiple monitors, currently I am using 4. I have been trying to find a solution where RDP can take two monitors and my local machine the other two but have not been successful. With RDP its either All Monitors, 1 monitor or span monitors. The big advantages to me is that I can go anywhere in the world with an internet connection and access my development machine. I don't need to carry my laptop. I can just use any computer I find. Even osx, ipads or anything else that has RDP client. Another plus is snapshots and clones. If I want to try something and not break my machine, just create a snapshot or clone. Also if you get a beefy VM server you can add additional resources to your development machine when need. I just changed my ram from 8GB to 16GB. I also use Dropbox to sync all my work documents and code between the virtual machine and my local laptop. Just in case I find that I can't access the internet or I want to edit a file locally when lag could be an issue (adobe, balsamiq or video's). The other purpose behind dropbox is that I can create a new virtual machine or get a new laptop and sync all my work documents and also access them from anywhere. I think when I move back to the Perth office I will still keep my virtual development environment. Regards Adrian Halid From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of Greg Harris Sent: Thursday, 3 October 2013 8:44 AM To: ozDotNet Subject: Virtual visual studio development machine - looking for some setup advice Hi People, I am about to setup a new development machine for a new development project and I was after some suggestions... I want to be able to run multiple separate environments at the same time so that I can test software in these environments and just trash the environment as needed when done. Also, the same idea sounds valid for my visual studio development environment. This would give me the advantage of being able to wind back to a prior known, good stable environment as needed. This would also give some additional benefits: * Disaster recovery when on the road: If I am seeing a client on the other side of the world and my laptop dies, I can go into the local store, buy a new machine and start up a VM on the machine and I have all of my environments back again at reduced stress. * Quickly move to new physical machine as needed to get additional resources. * Separate environment for each project. * Ability to build a VM and send it to the cloud for production use. I am thinking that at any one time, I would be running VM's for: * Stable stuff like office, file system and database * Development (Visual Studio) * Test environments (typically only one, but maybe more) I realise that I am going to need to give the physical machine a LOT MORE memory and disk (but disk is cheap, probably use an SSD, OK not cheap). The other resources should share well. My guest VPC's will all be some form of Windows OS (both 32 and 64 bit) hosted on Win 7 Pro 64 bit. The initial concerns I have are around the user interface * UI responsiveness, I have seen on some VPC's the mouse jitter around and it be unclear where you are pointing, this can be very disconcerting. * I tend to use two or three monitors at a time, the VPC must support this. I am thinking that I will keep as little as possible running on the host OS, so that I (almost) never need to reboot it. I have already found some useful references on the web: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/633774/optimize-development-virtual-machine http://www.andrewconnell.com/HOWTO-Squeeze-Every-Last-Drop-of-Performance-Out-of-Your-Virtual-PCs Before I go and burn a lot of time on this, I wanted to review this with the list... Questions: * Do any of you do this? * Does it work well? * What should I lookout for? * What tools should I use? I assume that the best options available for hosting my VM's are one of: * VMWare http://www.vmware.com * Oracle Virtual Box http://www.virtualbox.org * MS Virtual PC http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3702 MS Virtual PC is 2011, does that mean it is stable or they have moved on to something else? Thanks in advance for your help :-). Regards Greg Harris
