Using Virtual PC for Web Development with Oracle

Question

Is anyone using Virtual PC to maintain multiple large .NET 1.1 and 2.0 websites? Are there any lessons learned? I used Virtual PC recently with a small WinForms app and it worked great, but then everything works great with WinForms. ASP.NET development hogs way more resources, requires IIS to be running, requires a ridiculously long wait after recompilations, etc., so I'm a little concerned. And I'll also be using Oracle, if that makes any difference.

Also, is there any real reason to use VM Ware instead of Virtual PC?

Answer 1

I've used VirtualPCs for a few years for development of some fairly hefty web apps without much problem. Lots of RAM is important. I keep my VPCs on an external USB drive and they perform great from there. This gives me the flexibility to take the drive with me if I need to do work somewhere else... just install VPC on a host plug in the USB drive and start coding.

For servers, we use VMWare and have had little to no trouble with it.

Recently I went back to working on my local machine as you lose the benefit of dual monitors with VPCs, and I don't need to be as mobile as I used to.

Answer 2

Virtual PC 2007 is very fast esp on a CPU that has hardware support for VM's. 3GB RAM a must for anything not small. XP makes a good guest OS, Vista works well as a host.

Answer 3

Thanks for all the answers. So RAM is the key.

As far as dual monitor capability, I found that I could use dual monitors, as long as one of those monitors was my actual machine. And that was what I wanted anyway.

Mike

Answer 4

As long as you have the resources (separate hard disk for the virtual machine, sufficient RAM), I don't see why you would have any problems.

Answer 5

If you are going to be using VPCs as a server...perhaps Hyper-V (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_Virtualization) is something to look at.

Its pretty powerful, in how it lets you assign RAM / CPU Cores to a virtualized machine.