Best VM for Delphi development with parallel port

Question

I see that a number of people are doing S/W development (not just Delphi) using a virtual machine to host the IDE and all required files. I've used Microsoft Virtual PC to debug issues with my Applications on various OS's but with little access 'outside' the VM. My applications use USB, serial and - crucially - direct I/O writes to hardware (via an I/O permission driver). I'd like to have the VM see all of this (only one VM would run at a time of course). Is this possible? Is there a preference of Virtual PC versus VMWare?

Answer 1

I haven't tried it with a parallel port, but VMWare Workstation 6 (running Windows XP Pro on top of a real XP Pro host) allows me to talk to the serial ports just fine. I have a 2-port serial comms card in the machine and VMWare is configured to give control of the ports to the guest machine. (This is for a cheque-scanning device).

I haven't gotten into this with the USB versions of the cheque-scanner yet, but my experiences with VMWare Workstation on the PC (and VMWare Fusion on the Mac) would suggest that this will also work - it's pretty good at giving you access to the underlying devices if you take the trouble to configure the VM software at first.

I'll be interested to see what other responses you get. :-)

Answer 2

I have experience with Virtual PC and VMWare Workstation. While Virtual PC does a good job of managing the OS it doesn't expose USB or parallel ports while VMWare Workstation does. The good news is that VMWare has a converter you can use to convert a Virtual PC VM into something that they can use, and you can use the free VMWare Player to test with before making the switch. Sadly the migration is a one way path, so make a backup of your Virtual PC VM's before you go thru the conversion.