No, I’ve not tried Virtual PC. As with most MS products, it seems to think that everyoine lives in a MS world. Other virtualization products explicitly support OS’ like Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc. Virtual PC either doesn’t or MS doesn’t feel that the support is important enough to mention.

Thanks for the comment,
=C=

I wanted to tell you since you’re host machine is windows, did you consider using Virtual PC? I just used it for the very first time last night to setup on my new Vista laptop and I was actually impressed with it. I use Virtual Server 2005 on my development machine for my VM’s and was looking to setup something similar on my laptop. I started with Virtualbox, but realized that you have to do so many hacks to get a vhd working on it or converted over to it. Than I gave Virtual PC a try, in 5 minutes it was installed and I fired up a vhd from my USB drive. Another thing that I want to recommend, and again, i didn’t read the comments. But I wanted to tell you that you should consider setting up an SVN repository on one of your machines that’s accessible through the web so that you will always have the same code from environment to environment. This will help you detach yourself from any 1 particular machine since the environments are the same and all you have to do is update the version you’re working on the machine you happen to be in front of. Sorry, one more recommendation. I would also create skeleton VM’s with just the operating system only. If you need a new machine, you simply copy the file and place it wherever you have your VM’s running from and just install PHP 5.3 or whatever new version you want. This way you always have a good starting point. These are things that I picked up on over the last couple of years messing around with virtualization. I think it’s the best thing ever and I can’t imagine working without it.

1) Use Vista (despite all the Mac commercials I use and it is reliable, stable, and better than XP) I have both 64-bit and 32-bit systems. 64-bit is better for me. Install as much RAM as you can afford.

2) Install Vistual PC from Microsoft – It’s free

3) Create as many virtual machines as you want. VPC supports shared folders also.

I did read a comment, that recommend to use subversion.
The process described is develop, commit and then (code is auto exported to the dev server) test !

You should, (have to), test BEFORE, commiting your code ! Never commit before test.

The virtualisation solution have a big advantage : in big companies, developpers don’t manage production servers and don’t manage versions.
With virtualisation give responsabilities to the servers managers to provide, the environnement as a virtual image.

One more big advantage, the deployment of a new workspace for a new developper, is FAST, and under control !

Hope it’s useful for some,
Steven

I was attempting exactly the same setup as you and saw the same issues, after a bit of a trawl around the web though I ran into a VirtualBox command line interface called VBoxManage which is provided as part of VirtualBox.

The following article provides a quick guide to how you can setup access to your guest Linux OS by redirecting web traffic directed at a certain port – works beautifully.
Take a look at http://allisterx.blogspot.com/2008/05/web-server-on-virtualbox-gues-os.html

Cheers,

Alan.

Reading your blog post I was reminded to the challenges I had to overcome a couple years ago, where I had to set up several development environments that were matching the staging environments as closely as possible. At that point in time, VMWare was the best solution out there.

Over the years I became a big fan of the VMware solutions, because now it was easy to build an environment and distribute it to fellow developers on an USB stick or over the network.

Even when giving training courses, it was easy to provide the “students” a small image they could run with a free available player.

Over the years other virtualization solutions came into play, but I stayed with VMWare because all my images were prepped for VMWare.

The most important thing about virtualization solutions is how flexible you can implement it’s usage, and in my opinion VMWare has already proven this for a long time.

Cheers,

Michelangelo