Any Tips for Doing *All* Your Work in a Single Virtual Machine?

Question

I bought a new Vista PC recently but was having lots of problems getting everything to work on it, so I continued doing most of my work (development and other) on a slow XP machine that I've had for years.

Until now, that is - I used VMware Convertor to take an image of my old XP machine, and now I'm running it on my Vista machine, and doing pretty much all my work within that XP virtual machine. I'm using VMware Worstation.

So each morning I boot up my Vista machine, and then I boot up my XP virtual machine and spend the whole day working in the XP virtual machine.

Yes, you can probably guess: I'm the complete opposite of a VMware power user... I've not figured out snapshots, linked clones, or anything more than the absolute basics of running a VM. But I set this system up OK, and it's working well. Everything's running a lot faster than it was on my old machine anyway.

However, I'm concerned about the VM getting corrupted or something and causing me to lose everything. Of course I can back the whole VM up, and I can back up files from on the VM, and I will, but I'm wondering if it might be easier and safer to use a mapped drive or public folder or something for all my work, so that if the XP VM goes kaput, my files will all be available from the Vista machine.

This would also be good because I could share files easily between the Vista and the XP machine (I do use Vista for the odd thing). But I'm wondering if it'll make it much slower to read and write files from my XP machine? (e.g. if I'm compiling a big Java project, which will involve lots of IO at once.)

The information on how to set these things up is readily available, but I haven't found it so easy to figure out the best approach for what I'm doing. Most people are using VMs for much more advanced purposes than mine.

Also I'm wondering if there are any other tips or important considerations for this doing-all-your-work-in-one-VM type of setup? e.g. what's likely to go wrong, and how can I avoid it? Anything else?

Answer 1

Surely if you are doing all your work in a VM, it's time to think about changing your host machine to one that's usable, no?

Answer 2

I have an Ubuntu Linux box at home which has three VMs, all totally self-contained.

The first is for my wife's business, she needs access to all the MS Office stuff and MYOB.

The second is for work, they're too tight to buy me a laptop and I'm not going to let them install their hideous security and auto-update products on my real box.

The third is my Visual Studio development VM.

It runs like a dream (although only ever tested one VM at a time). And I just backup all the VM files from Ubuntu (along with my Linux work as well) which basically gives me images of the VM hard drives.

Answer 3

As others have pointed out, it is time to think about changing your host OS to one you are comfortable with and can get your work done on. Depending on what you do on a day to day basis on your machine, I can bet Vista is going to be anything more than a big hurdle. Why tax your work and yourself by running VMware on top of a beast that Vista is only to do all your work inside the VMware?

Having said that, I do suggest that you look into VMware snapshots and cloning. Those two are powerful features, not least the former in your case, which can be used to avert, in addition to solving, a lot of common problems you can run into while running any OS inside a VMware.

I perform a crude backup once in a while where I compress the VMware image on disk with toolsk like 7-zip, and store them on backup media. However, for backups or restore points within the system, VMware's Linked Cloning is definitely a handy feature -- since Windows is susceptible to getting corrupt/infected often, with linked cloning, you can be pretty sure that you can easily revert back to the last state before the corruption took place, and continue your work unimpeded from there.

Answer 4

I have been using VMWare at work for a couple of years now. I use it for development and testing. As long as your base PC is good enough it is a really good way to separate your "PC Life".

I would certainly be storing your data files on a server somewhere. This can be either a mapped drive, source control, or whatever. When you start using snapshots it is really easy to wipe a session, so treating your base PC as a kind of NAS avoids this problem.

I have now decided to start using VMWare at home. I have a VM for business apps (Office, QuickBooks etc), one for Visual Studio development and several others for web servers, sql servers etc. My base PC has 8GB RAM & a 2.8GHz quad core processor, so running four or more VMs is no problem.

Answer 5

I'm wondering if it might be easier and safer to use a mapped drive or public folder or something for all my work

Please please please, use a version control system (that is also backed up) if you're working mainly with text files. A mapped drive or public folder is accessible, but not the best way.