Tips to upgrade workstations for development team?

Question

I have secured the budget to upgrade the individual workstations and latops. While newer, bigger screens were welcomed with enthusiasm, the thought of re-installation tools and settings caused most of them to blanch and I got one "Do I really have to?".

How much downtime do you usually have when you move to a new machine?

Do you employ tools or script to set up your dev environment, tools, db's, debuggers etc.specifically for a windows environment?

Is there a standard image that you keep and then let devs move in and tweak the machine as necessary?

Answer 1

My company essentially virtualized in order to stop wasting so much time with upgrades/system failures.

Whenever a desktop/laptop failed, we'd have to spend a better part of a day fixing it and reloading the software.

So, we went out, bought iMacs for everyone and loaded Parallels (a VMware like product for OSX) on them. Then we made a standard dev image for everyone, and just copied it to everyone's machines.

Essentially, if anyone's configuration got messed, we just loaded in a fresh image and kept on truckin'. Saved a lot of time.

Some additional benefits:

1. When new software is out, we just make a new image and distribute it. Not OS re-installs or anything like that.
2. If hardware changes, doesn't matter, just move the image.
3. You can run multiple os's concurrently for testing
4. You can take "snapshots" in your current image and revert if you really messed something up.
5. Multiple builds on the same machine...since you can run multiple os's.

Surprisingly the overhead of a virtualized system is quite low.

We only run the software on a real machine for performance tuning/testing purposes.

Answer 2

One day is generally enough for upgrades. I do keep digital copies of VS.NET so much easier to install.

When it comes to other tools generally it's just better to go to websites and install the latest version.

Also it's a good idea to install tools whenever you need instead of trying to install everything at the same time.