I've developed few little Sharepoint application on Microsoft Virtual PC but now we start a new and bigger project on Sharepoint.
What do you think? Should we switch from VPC to VMWare (Server?) or there is no significant performance differences?
(Developer's hardware: notebook with external hard drive, 2GB memory, Core 2 Duo)
I've never had any trouble developing for SHarepoint in Virtual PC. But I'm only a sample size of one, of course.
I think you should stick to what you currently have implemented unless there's a specific feature that VMWare implements that VPC doesn't. Are you building your production implementation as a VM or simply your development environment? If it's the latter then definitely stick with VPC, no need to change. If it's production then you may benefit from VMWare, it's been around a lot longer and has slight performance improvements over VPC (or at least did last time I looked, a year or more ago).
I think as Lazarus that you should stay with what you know. But for the case you search something new: There is also VirtualBox which I use since a half year for my dev-machines.
Reason: It runs faster as VPC and has some nice features. Also I can use this Software under Windows as much as under Linux/Unix
Edit
I think for SharePoint Development the only one really important thing is the remote debugger. Everything else is just "nice to have".
I've used dozens of virtual machines for SharePoint development and used both VMWare and VPC (although most are VPCs) and I haven't noticed any significant differences.
For your developer's notebook I'd up the RAM to 4G. Actually, if you have the opportunity you really want to go with 64-bit Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V with two internal drives, one of which should probably be a solid state drive. The next version of SharePoint will require 64-bit.
I'd recommend VMware Workstation as the best choice for development due to speed/performance (it's cheap, but not free).
I use Workstation on my desktop, we have a dedicated server running ESXi and 20+ machines for testing and also other support technicians can use the free VMware Player to run images that I've created but not uploaded to the testing server.
I'd recommend to use vmWare over VPC because it has one unbeatable feature - snapshots. You can create a snapshot of you system in any stage and return back there, if something when wrong
For example your install Windows from the scratch and install SharePoint there. You create snapshot and start configuring your SharePoint. If something went wrong you can return back to previous state in 1 minute. It's really cool and useful stuff. I use VPC since year 2000, and switched all my servers to vmWare 2 years ago. really happy with vmWare
I do all my SharePoint work on a virtual box in our VMWare ESX server and it works like a charm. When I mess up my dev machine I just revert to a privious snapshot or create a new image based on a "approved" image or "borrow" a clone from one of my coworkers. If you are in a fairly sized shop ESX server might be the way to go.
I run both VMware player and the new VirtualBox software on my laptop but that is just for fun as the performance is below what I would accept in my daytime job.
In my particular case, I was developing on a MacBook Pro (ha ha, right?), since it was the only machine powerful enough to make it worthwhile available to me (my company workstation was not), and I was able to use the free VPC images from Microsoft, convert them with VMWARE's convertor, and run them successfully on VMWARE Fusion 2.0 for Mac.
They "fail" at 97% in, but in reality, you startup the VMWARE image, and it's good to go.
Hope that helps someone.
This might help you : http://techcurious.blogspot.com/2010/03/installing-sharepoint-server-2010-in.html