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On the positive side Hetzner are an excellent host, unbeatable value and amazing support.
I've taken the system through about 10 countries in 2 years. I don't really have a house, and I have to carry everything with me. (That includes a video camera, a heavy pro DSLR, chargers, etc.)
I do use VMWare, plus occasionally game, video edit, etc. and so have similar performance requirements.
Given the above, and that recently my partner bought a new Macbook Air (far cheaper), and we took both of them travelling around a few months of Indonesia, Thailand, etc., I think I am well informed to comment.
My advice would be this: Think very carefully about comfort and workflow, before money.
Comfort-wise, for me, having a large screen and keyboard are non-negotiable. The difference is huge, particularly if you want to use the thing instead of a desktop for any length of time (eg. multi-country mobility, like my situation).
Workflow-wise, it's ultimately all about your specific situation. In my situation, I don't have enough space to store all my raw images, VMs, video, etc. but have come to a good solution with a secondary small form-factor external USB3 drive I access from the Mac (via rsync over SSH and a Linux VM, no less! I don't trust non-ext3 filesystems after bad experiences! Some driver I found claiming ext* support on OSX never worked.). I've never had an SSD-is-primary-drive machine, so don't feel there is any issue with speed.
As for remote ... depends on the connection quality and reliability where you are planning to go.
Sounds to me like you could probably solve your build/test issues by queueing testing via your development process, eg. by syncing your new code only when online and using a remote (eg. EC2-hosted) continuous integration server which could probably resolve a lot of issues you never knew you had, as well as the ones you are looking at. That way you could use cloud windows boxes spun up automatically from platform-linked images, potentially bringing them up and down automatically with your CI server.
If you are worried about money, don't be. We forget how much time we spend in front of these things. It's far better to invest in good tools. Really. I mean, 60Mb/s fiber in Europe, don't worry about a few ms, or a few hundred dollars. Worry about your health.
In terms of latency, I've found that http://mosh.mit.edu/ pretty much delivers on its promises.
If it were not for the odd reboot, it is a "set and forget" kind of thing.
I have just moved all my servers to hetzner a few days ago. I'm running them all on a Quad Core i7 with 32GB mem, it's an EX 4S. So far so good. Expect a day to get the server and make sure you order any extra ip's when you order the server otherwise you will have to wait a day for the ip. I needed one extra ip because i'm running vmware free esxi hypervisor and it doesn't route traffic to it's clients. So I have a v…
I suggest you install a Windows XP, Win Server inside the virtual, turn on the "automatic start up" on that VM, just after you the automatic start up of your virtual FW and use RDP with a 2 factor authentication (duo security is free and works beautifully), which now is you "management" machine.
Just my 2 cents on Virtual Security, since this is the setup I have :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, I don't do any gaming but I would like the ability for multiple monitors. This article suggest that the latest 2012 models do support 2 external displays - http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/06/new-macbooks-can-manage...
I didn't know the 2012 models support multiple monitors. Since that's the case and you do not want to game it's a no brainer. 8GB of ram + SSD will get you far!
If only it had 16GB (not available on the 13" rMBP model), it would be the perfect laptop
Also, I think you will be very very very hard pressed to find anyone who owns a Macbook air who would tell you to get anything else. People who don't own them underestimate them and they're not anywhere near as underpowered as people act like.
A company I own rents virtual servers that run on Hetzner hardware. We had terrible trouble getting Xen or KVM to run correctly on their network and never got the networking to function correctly so we gave up and offered OpenVZ only. This was a year or two ago, perhaps things have changed though. On the positive side Hetzner are an excellent host, unbeatable value and amazing support.
If you want portability, get an 11". Maybe you think you need those extra 2", but I believe in time that you will find you are wrong, and never look back.
Before, I had a MacBook Pro with a HDD. I would use my iPad whenever I could, because it'd be instantly on and feel faster in use. My MBA has a 256GB SSD and it feels just as fast as my iPad.
Back to the main topic: I keep Windows VMs, version management and backups at a dedicated server at Leaseweb. Local copies are kept on the MBA and a Mac mini at home (where it's also backed up to external disks by SuperDuper). This way, I can always choose to work on my iPad or MBA, files are accesible from everywhere.
It seems like a reasonable idea to me if you always have a fast connection.