Any tips on working * All * Your work in a single virtual machine?

Question

I recently bought a new PC with Vista, but I had a lot of problems so that everything worked on it, so I continued most of my work (development and others) on the slow XP machine that I had for many years.

So far, this is what I used VMware Convertor to take an image of my old XP machine, and now I run it on my Vista machine and do almost all of my work on this XP virtual machine. I am using VMware Worstation.

So, every morning I boot up my Vista machine, and then boot up my XP virtual machine and work all day on the XP virtual machine.

Yes, you can probably guess: I am completely opposed to the Powerware VMware user ... I have not figured out snapshots, related clones or anything more than the absolute basics of a virtual machine. But I set this system back to normal and it works well. Everything works much faster than on my old car.

However, I am concerned that the virtual machine is damaged or something else, and I lost everything. Of course, I can support the entire VM, and I can back up files in a virtual machine, but I will, but I wonder if it might be easier and safer to use a mapped drive or a public folder or something else for all my work , so that if the VM VM is sent to kaput, my files will be accessible from Vista.

It would also be nice, because I could easily share files between Vista and the XP machine (I use Vista for the weird thing). But I wonder if it will be much slower to read and write files from my XP machine? (for example, if I compile a large Java project that will include many IOs at once.)

Information on how to fix these things is easily accessible, but it was not easy for me to find the optimal approach to what I am doing. Most people use virtual machines for much more complex purposes than mine.

I also wonder if there are any other tips or important considerations for this type of all-your-work-in-one-VM installation. for example, what could go wrong, and how can I avoid this? Anything else?

Answer 1

I have an Ubuntu Linux box at home that has three virtual machines, all fully autonomous.

The first business for my wife, she needs access to all the materials of MS Office and MYOB.

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

Thirdly, this is my Visual Studio development virtual machine.

It works like a dream (although only ever tested one virtual machine at a time). And I just backup all the VM files from Ubuntu (along with my work with Linux), which basically gives me VM hard drive images.

Answer 2

Sure, if you are doing all your work in a virtual machine, it's time to think about changing the host machine to one that you can use, no?

Answer 3

As others have noted, it's time to think about changing the host system to the one that is convenient for you, and you can do your job. Depending on what you do on a day-to-day basis on your machine, I bet that Vista will become more than a big barrier. Why pay for your work and yourself by running VMware on top of the beast that Vista should only do all of your work inside VMware?

Having said that, I suggest you take a look at VMware snapshots and cloning . These two are powerful features, not least in your case, that can be used to prevent, in addition to solving, many common problems that you may encounter when running any OS inside VMware.

I do a rough backup from time to time when I compress a VMware image to disk using tools like 7-zip and save them to backup media. However, for backing up or restoring points on the system, VMware Linked Cloning is definitely a convenient feature - since Windows is prone to frequent damage / infection, tied to cloning, you can be sure that you can return to the latter before corruption occurred , and continue your work unhindered from there.

Answer 4

I have been using VMWare at work for a couple of years. I use it for development and testing. While your base PC is good enough, this is a really good way to separate your PC Life.

Of course, I will store your data files on the server somewhere. This can be either a mapped drive, or a control source, or whatever. When you start using snapshots, it’s very easy to erase the session, so accessing the host PC as a kind of NAS avoids this problem.

Now I decided to start using VMWare at home. I have a virtual machine for business applications (Office, QuickBooks, etc.), One for developing Visual Studio and several others for web servers, sql servers, etc. My base PC has 8 GB of RAM and a 2.8 GHz quad-core processor, so four or more virtual machines are no problem.

Answer 5

I am wondering if it might be easier and safer to use a mapped drive or shared folder or something for all of my work.

Please, please use the version control system (which is also supported) if you work mainly with text files. An available mapped drive or shared folder is available, but not the best way.