Ask HN: Why do you run multiple VM's?

#1

Post by Tvorba » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 9:25 AM UTC

Hey everyone!

I'm a developer working mostly on MS technologies so I don't really use VM's. I've been reading HN for quite some time and every time there's a development thread (or the latest Dell XPS13 and its 8GB RAM thread) a lot of developers pop-up saying that they "constantly" run n VM's (n > 1).

Can you please explain to me, what are some cases that this makes sense (please don't write just "multiple build environments" but expand a bit)?

Thanks for your answers!

Re: Ask HN: Why do you run multiple VM's?

#2

Post by logn » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 9:34 AM UTC

I think it's mostly from developers trying to use their target deployment environment or to use a common dev environment image. Others might like it as a nice way to sandbox different workspaces and for convenient functionality of taking snapshots you can revert to (like source control but for your whole machine). Also some orgs have their QA make extensive use of VMs to test different set ups and for reproducible bug reports.

Re: Ask HN: Why do you run multiple VM's?

#3

Post by Tvorba » Fri, Feb 20, 2015, 11:01 AM UTC

logn wrote: post #2

I think it's mostly from developers trying to use their target deployment environment or to use a common dev environment image. Others might like it as a nice way to sandbox different workspaces and for convenient functionality of taking snapshots you can revert to (like source control but for your whole machine). Also some orgs have their QA make extensive use of VMs to test different set ups and for reproducible bu…

Sure, I understand that, but a lot of people are talking about running multiple headless VM's at once and I can't really see any use cases outside of QC/QA environments. Even for people working on multiple projects at once (for multiple clients) it sounds like there is no real reason to run more than 2 at once (one for tools, the other for the server environment).