vmware and performance for developing [closed]

Question

Curious, how many of you develop under a VMware environment?

Is it popular for employers to setup vmware for everyone?

Seems like a great way to rollout new desktop computers and perform backups etc.

Just worried about the performance though (PC vmwares).

Update

I was just looking at vmware's site, 1.3 BILLION in sales..wow!

Answer 1

I almost exclusively use Virtual Machines for development and am very happy doing so. The flexibility of multiple sand-boxed environments is definitely worth a small trade in performance.

Clearly a VM will never give you the same results as running on a native system, but you should be able to get performance that's easily within 10-15% of the real thing. In my experience many of the performance problems people encounter are due to underspecced or poorly configured systems and VM;s.

I primarily develop with a Vista x64 virtual machine on a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of Ram. Of this I assign 2GB of RAM and two virtual core's to my main VM. If I'm running more than one VM I usually change this to 1-1.5GB and one core.

Here's some quick GeekBench test results; (Note than GeekBench results under OSX and Vista don't seem comparable, they're listed here to show the impact of configs on both systems).

Fresh boot, no active applications:

Native OSX - 3115 Native OSX running Vista 64 VM - 3042 Native Vista 64 (2.4GHz x 2, 4GB) - 2596 Vista 64 VM (2 VCore, 3GB) - 2362 Vista 64 VM (1 VCore, 2GB) - 1892

These are the most common reasons for poor VM performance in my experience;

• Under-specced machines. Ideally you should be able to dedicate one core and 1GB of memory to each VM you plan to work in. Contrary to what you might read I've found that Vista runs within a few percent of XP with 1GB of memory.
• Running too many things on your VM. Keep your email, web browsing and IM's to Mummy on your native OS.
• On your VM turn off items such as screensavers, background apps and non-essential services. If your VM's are backed-up you may want to turn off system restore.
• If possible have your VM's on a separate hard-drive than your native OS so their disc access is independent if one or the other starts paging.
• Defrag your VM drive. It does make a difference.