What sort of work do you guys do? Also how bad is the speed hit?
From this: http://superuser.com/questions/146623/performance-impact-of-... it seems like it'd be noticeable (20% I/O hit).
From this: http://superuser.com/questions/146623/performance-impact-of-... it seems like it'd be noticeable (20% I/O hit).
VMs are fast enough these days. So fast, in fact, that I'm regularly blown away by them even though I use them so much.
We're not concerned about disk I/O but the app does have heavy network I/O. (though latency rather than bandwidth is the main concern).
Also, I assume for virtualization you are talking about the worst case (perf-wise): running Linux in a VM inside another operating system? Rather than the better one of having a hypervisor directly manage both the user's main OS (win/osx) and linux?
Yes. I usually run Linux and WinXP on top of OS X and WinXP on top of Linux. Works great!
EDIT: I use VirtualBox OSE. VMWare works even better if you can afford it. Sometimes I use Qemu for trying out toy operating systems, but I find it too slow for actual work.
Our local deploy process is mostly scripted so it's not much of a pain point to have to redeploy new changes.
I'm liking the VM ideas people have been talking about here; is it possible to just mount the guest OS' file system on the host (perhaps by running an NFS server in the VM) and develop directly on it?