Virtualisation and the future application development

For the second time this year I've taken delivery of an dual core (Intel Centrino Duo). The first one I got was the fantastically superb Acer, on which I've installed VMWare. Last week I was asked the quesiton "we've got a Mac Book Pro in the cupboard do you want it?" and oddly I replied "oh okay then". Being a Mac it was of course impossible to connect to our companies systems so on went Parallels and a standard company image (for those using Radia out there in VM land there are some registry elements that need to be removed) went on and soon I was not only connecting to the company network I was also VPN'ing into it.

The Mac is now my "official" company laptop, and the Acer is my "official" development laptop. Mainly because VMWare Server runs like a dream on the Acer which makes running servers really easy, while Parallels is aimed more at a virtual desktop environment which is what I need for Outlook and the MS Office crew.

Running on Dual Core makes this all the more effective paticularly for development, as you can can run the IDE and the native OS in one core and then run a huge array of servers dedicated to the other core (along with the virus scanner and the other annoyances). This sort of model also makes it much easier to start up projects than its been historically.

The old cycle was "get kit, get software, learn how to install software, install on kit", this has recently been improved by developers doing everything locally but its been a right pain in the arse making sure that everyone has the same dev configuration, and putting things like Oracle on the machine just makes it run slower even when you aren't using it. And when you screw it up and have to do the uninstall re-install cycle something always seems to be left behind.

A virtual machine environment changes this. Instead of everyone installing an application server you just have a single virtual machine image that everyone can copy. Mess it up and you just pull down a fresh one. Running virtual machines locally only means that people can be just as effective at home as at work and you aren't having issues with someone else killing the box you are working on.

So if you are looking at upgrading your development hardware, or want to build a case around it I'd heartily recommend looking at things like VMWare Server, Xen, Parellels or Microsoft's Virtual Server as an integral part of those solutions. There are already off the shelf images available and within a project or company environment you should look at establishing your own.

So rather than in future having some poor sap having to work his way around the different developers to keep solving lots of minor config problems you can have that person set up the "right" configuration and then have everyone download it.

Some recommendations

1. For Server VMs keep the network connection local
2. Don't worry about "slow" these are single user instances so keep it minimal
3. Memory is king, 2 GB is the minimum amount you should be looking at
4. Servers = Headless, you don't want developers dealing with these directly if you can avoid it, these are remote deployment boxes
5. Images are disposable, don't worry about fancy OS support functions, its bare bones stuff
   

As core counts and memory goes ever higher and virtualisation becomes ever more effective (Parallels running windows on one 2Ghz core was more than twice as fast as windows native on a 1.4Ghz Celeron M machine) then this really enables us to change the way we develop.

Now there is the licensing question of course....

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