VirtualPC 2007 rocks!
As I outlined in my last post, last week at RSA 2007, we demonstrated a complex proof of concept of what online banking could look like if CardSpace was used for sign-in. This POC demonstrated Wachovia's banking website running on Corillian's Voyager online banking platform, using Arcot Systems' WebFort suite.
This POC required three environments and would have required three machines. However, we weren't too keen to ship, build, configure and run three machines to run this demo, so we decided to try using VirtualPC on a honking big box instead.
Now, those of you who've seen some of my demos or read my previous posts will know that I am a huge fan of virtual machines. I used VMWare for several years and then VirtualPC became my tool of choice. However, whilst I love VirtualPC, it remained a tool to make demos easier to deploy and deliver.
However, that might well change!
To run this POC, we chose to try VirtualPC 2007, and boy, were we glad we did! To run the three hefty parts of the POC, we built up a box with a dual-core CPU with hardware virtualization support, 4GB RAM and 3x160GB HDD's (not RAIDed – just plain drives) running Windows Vista x64. Yep, x64! You can run Virtual PC 2007 on Vista x86 or x64, and run a host of x86 guest OS', including Vista, XP, etc!
The result?
The experience was just amazing – nobody could actually tell that the client side of the demo was running in a VPC – it was amazingly responsive and even handled Vista's Aero UI *and* the other two VPC's churning away in the background!
Both Garrett and I are going to ask for one new box each in order to replace between 3-5 machines each. This will make it MUCH easier for us to manage a bunch of VPC images, running several simultaneously whilst enjoying a full-fidelity user experience and great responsiveness.
To the Virtual PC 2007 team – you guys rock!! J
