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[nycphp-talk] Virtualbox as a dev environment

David Krings ramons at gmx.net
Fri Sep 2 14:51:27 EDT 2011


On 9/2/2011 1:23 PM, Yitzchak Schaffer wrote:
> I've been using VMware Server (free as in beer) to run Ubuntu VMs on my
> laptops for 1+ years. Works great for me.
>
> I have one VM for dev work, and another for staging, which is set up like
> production. Easy to create a fresh one to test restoration of backups.

I used to use VMWare Server as well, but found the performance to be dismal.

> My previous laptop with 3GB of RAM could barely run dev (1GB) and staging
> (512MB) together, plus some essential apps like Thunderbird, browser, IDE.
> Which is pretty good, I think. I have a new Sandy Bridge laptop (Latitude,
> i5-2520M) with 4GB, and all is good now.
>
> The admin interface is a little slow, but the VM itself is quite fast IMO.

I agree, the admin UI is a total dog, but the VMs are not too shabby, but 
compared to VMWare Player it is rather slow.

VMWare Player used to be just that, a tool to play VMs. But while VMWare 
Server is no longer maintained a lot of changes were made to VMWare Player, 
including the option to create new VMs.

Also, if there is a box available that can be dedicated to VMs then ESX and 
Xen as well as Linux KVM are options.

As far as VirtualBox is concerned, I found it to be extremely crash happy.



David



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