Virtualized Awesome
I’ve been using Hyper-V for a couple weeks and have been pleasantly surprised at how much benefit it’s brought me. What I love best is how I can start up a VM on my server box, add a network card and then log into it using remote desktop on another box. It's seemless and easy, not something I expected from just sitting down and using a server component.
Some benefits I’ve noticed in my daily routine:
Multitasking
Certain large tools only run in certain environments and it’s not possible to run them at the same time. With a virtual machine, I can run both simultaneously on the same physical box.
Long Operation Pausing
Some programs I have to run can take a few days to complete. It’s a pain to have to have a machine monopolized while it runs. But now I can run the operation on a virtual machine and if I need to use the physical machine for something else I simply save the virtual machine’s state. (While the virtual machine isn’t as fast, the operation usually finishes overnight anyway.)
Debugging Different OSes
Testers have been using virtualization to test our changes on different operating systems for a while now. Instead of having four separate machines (or one with multiple OS’s installed), you have one with many virtual machines.
I realize now that there’s the same benefits for developers: investigating OS specific bugs is a complete pain usually involving having a tester give you access to their machine. Now having a virtual machine server, I simply startup the desired OS image and remote debug the problem.
(Side note: It was totally awesome when I noticed out of the blue I was getting Areo effects running through remote desktop to a virtualized Vista machine.)
Application Hosting
Many times people will want to try out a change I've made for themselves. Usually this involves sending them all the bits and they have to have a spare machine to install it on. Now I start up “ChrisDemo” and let people remotely log in.
This week’s geek level: Frighteningly High
