Is it feasible to virtualize developer machines?

Question

It's budgeting time and Corporate is balking at the cost of replacing a coworker's machine who is due for it, needs it, and deserves it.

Our group is a small ISV/SAAS that exists as a division of a larger media group. We are not a cost center, we make money, even this year. We are owned by a mid-size media group whose business model is quite different, and seems driven only by reducing costs.

Our software stack is Visual Studio 2008, SQL 2008, on Windows Server 2008 (so that multiple root websites can be hosted and debugged on each dev's machine). Our target hardware is 3GHz quad-core workstation, 4GB RAM, and RAID 1 mirrored hard drives so that we are protected against the productivity loss of losing a developer hard drive.

Corporate wants to give us a couple powerful, but hand-me-down, decommissioned servers, and then each developer would have a virtual workstation on that server. The computers sitting on our desktops would be dumb terminals at $400-500 each.

I'm trying to be neutral but I doubt it's hard to discern my bias. I'd like to see real developer reactions to this, and I figure this is the best place to get that.

Please include arguments for or against, evidence if you've seen this tried and how well (or not) it has gone.

Answer 1

This sounds like a well intentioned idea, but:

In my experience you need multiple cores, lots of memory, and fast disks to be productive in today's modern IDE's. I don't see that happening in a virtual environment with any economy. Individual boxes are still better.

It's also an issue of control. In a virtual environment I can imagine all kinds of restrictions. Will you still be able to install your own tools, for example?

Ultimately, it's misguided. If this idea increases build times by any substantial amount, any savings in hardware will quickly be erased by lost productivity. Conversely, money that is spent on decent individual machines for developers will quickly pay for itself over and over in reduced build times.

Good quality individual machines are an investment, not a cost.