Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation In Your Development Environment
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation In Your Development Environment
#2Perhaps a middle ground could be using a virtual machine as a staging environment?
Re: Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation In Your Development Environment
#3We're big fans of virtualized development environments at my startup. Not only is it very helpful in preventing weird environment-related bugs like the autor states, it's a huge shortcut when it comes to bringing new developers onboard. Rather than have them spend hours tracking down links to all the right versions of your various libraries and installing things in the appropriate order, you hand them your image. For us, setup time for a new developer has gone from about a day to about 30 minutes, and most of that is time spent downloading Virtual Box.
In addition, if you get a little too clever and accidentally wipe out something crucial in your environment, you just spin up a new VM. It's a tremendous timesaver.
Re: Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation In Your Development Environment
#4[deleted]
Re: Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation In Your Development Environment
#5Note that its pretty much a must if you plan to have a MongoDB server as part of your dev environment on your home box - Mongo by design eats all the RAM it can find to map files to, and if you have Apache, Solr and MySQL running on the same box, things can get ugly :)
Re: Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation In Your Development Environment
#6Note that its pretty much a must if you plan to have a MongoDB server as part of your dev environment on your home box - Mongo by design eats all the RAM it can find to map files to, and if you have Apache, Solr and MySQL running on the same box, things can get ugly :)
Why do applications think they can manage my memory better than my kernel?
Re: Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation In Your Development Environment
#7Not strictly in the spirit of the post, but I use a nice VM setup I thoroughly recommend:
- Host: OSX (2.4GHz i5, 8GB ram)
- Guest1: Ubuntu 10.10 (1.5GB ram allocated; acts as a LAMP server, available to Host and other Guests)
- Guest2: WinXP (1.5GB ram allocated - I use it for IE and for Xara)
This config eats RAM, but affords so many advantages:
1/ Makes my LAMP server portable. Can set up on new computer in no time
2/ Means I can experiment with server software and can revert when I break something
3/ Enables easy cross-PLATFORM browser testing which is vital if you care about fonts and pixels
4/ Can easily fake slow internet connections etc for web dev
5/ Gedit :P
6/ Nautilus :P
Major disadvantage is filesystem access speed.
Re: Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation In Your Development Environment
#8Note that its pretty much a must if you plan to have a MongoDB server as part of your dev environment on your home box - Mongo by design eats all the RAM it can find to map files to, and if you have Apache, Solr and MySQL running on the same box, things can get ugly :)
Why do applications think they can manage my memory better than my kernel?
Because your kernel is general-purpose and has been tuned with certain balance between latency, throughput, and memory usage (memory management takes memory!) If your application deals with things < 4kb in size, has different performance needs &c, then it may achieve higher performance than just leaving everything up to the kernel.
Re: Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation In Your Development Environment
#9Now if I could only get some vmware ec2 direct compatibility up in here ... proprietary conversion tools = fail.
Re: Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation In Your Development Environment
#10Not strictly in the spirit of the post, but I use a nice VM setup I thoroughly recommend: - Host: OSX (2.4GHz i5, 8GB ram) - Guest1: Ubuntu 10.10 (1.5GB ram allocated; acts as a LAMP server, available to Host and other Guests) - Guest2: WinXP (1.5GB ram allocated - I use it for IE and for Xara) This config eats RAM, but affords so many advantages: 1/ Makes my LAMP server portable. Can set up on new computer in no tim…
PS, if anyone knows a solution to the file access speed issue (not just the filesystem of the guest, but also what ever you share with it from the host) please tell me. Parallels, VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox all have this issue and it drives me mad sometimes!