Virtual desktop environment for development

Question

Our network team is thinking of setting up a virtual desktop environment (via Windows 2008 virtual host) for each developer.

So we are going to have dumb terminals/laptops and should be using the virtual desktops for all of our work.

Ours is a Microsoft shop and we work with all versions of .net framework. Not having the development environments on the laptops is making the team uncomfortable.

Are there any potential problems with that kind of setup? Is there any reason to be worried about this setup?

Answer 1

What happens when the network goes down? Are your dev's just supposed to sit on their hands? Or maybe they could bring cards and play real solitare...

Seriously, though, Unless you have virtual 100% network uptime, and your dev's never work off-site (say, from home) I'm on the "this is a Bad Idea" side.

Answer 2

Unless there's a very good development-oriented reason for doing this, I'd say don't.

Your developers are going to work best in an environment they want to work in. Unless your developers are the ones suggesting it and pushing for it, you shouldn't be instituting radical changes in their work environments without very good reasons.

I personally am not at all a fan of remote virtualized instances for development work, either. They're often slower, you have to deal with network issues and latency, you often don't have as much control as you would on your own machine. The list goes on and on, and little things add up to create major annoyances.

Answer 3

If you go that route, make sure you bench the system aggressively before any serious commitment.

My experience of remote desktops is that it's ok for occasional use, but seldom sufficient for intensive computations and compilation typical of development work, especially at crunch time when everyone needs resources at the same time.

Answer 4

One option is to get rid of your network team.

Seriously though, I have worked with this same type of setup through VMWare and it wasn't much fun. The only reason why I did it was because my boss thought it might be worth a try. Since I was newly hired, I didn't object. However, after several months of programming this way, I told him that I preferred to have my development studio on my machine and he agreed.

First, the graphical interface isn't really clear with a virtual workstation since it's sending images over the network rather than having your video card's graphical driver render the image. Constant viewing of this gave me a headache.

Secondly, any install of components or tools required the network administrator's help which meant I had to hurry up and wait.

Third, your computer is going to process one application faster than your server is going to process many apps and besides that, it has to send the rendered image over the network. It doesn't sound like it slows you down but it does. Again, hurry up and wait.

Fourth, this may be specific to VMWare but the virtual disk size was fixed to 4GB which to my network guy seemed to think it was enough. This filled up rather quickly. In order for me to expand the drive, I had to wait for the network admin to run partition magic on my drive which screwed it up and I had to have him rebuild my installation.

There are several more reasons but I would strongly encourage you to protest if you can. Your company is probably trying to impliment this because it's a new fad and it can be a way for them to save money. However, your productivity time will be wasted and that needs to be considered as a cost.

Answer 5

It's good if you ever have to develop on-site, you can move your dev environment to a laptop and hit the road.
I could see it being required for some highly confidential multiple client work - there is a proof that you didn't leak any test data or debug files from one customer to another.

Down sides:
Few VMs support multiple monitors - without multiple monitors you can't be a productive developer.
Only virtualbox 3 gets close to being able to develop for opengl/activeX on a VM.

Answer 6

Not sure if that will affect you, but both VMWare and Virtual PC work very slow when viewed via Remote Desktop. For some reason Radmin (http://www.radmin.com/ ) does a much better job.

I regularly work with remote development environments and it is OK (although it takes some time to get used to keep track in which system you're working at the moment ;) ) - but most of the time I'm alone on the system.

Answer 7

Bad Idea. You're taking the most critical tool in your developers' arsenal and making it run much, much, much slower than it needs to, and introducing several critical dependencies along the way.