July 15, 2009
My main development machine was running on top of Windows Vista since it was pre-installed. When I bought the machine, I had neither time or willingness to switch OS.
To cut a long story short, Vista was really limiting the potential of my machine since out of the box it sucked up roughly 750MB of memory. After installing my usual tools, Vista was booting to a whopping 1GB of memory. This really limited my work since I constantly need to work with virtual machines.
So after reading some interesting information about using Windows Server 2008 as a main development machine and thinking how to go about it I finally made up my mind on the following setup.
Host OS: Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition + WICD Manager since Network Manager sucks, all of this installed in a 15GB partition along with a 5GB swap partition.
Ubuntu 9.04 uses less than 250MB after booting. Then I installed Sun’s VirtualBox 3 to create my virtual development machine. Guest OS, is Windows Server 2008 standard with some small tweaks to make it more useable as a desktop OS.
Windows Server 2008 consumes roughly 300MB after booting, leaving ample space for me to work.
With this configuration I also get all of the flexibility of virtual machines, such as cloning, suspending, using the same Ubuntu host OS machine to load any virtual machine I need, and on top of all that, never have to re-install Windows or any software if something goes wrong.
All virtual machines’ files are stored and run from an external 500GB drive, which is backed up on to another 500GB external drive. This way I am not tied to any particular machine, reducing downtime if something goes wrong. All big pluses.
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