I've decided that virtualization is the way to go. This is not to say that I haven’t virtualized in the past. I’ve had VPC virtual boxes that host IE6, IE7 and IE8. This allowed me to test my web applications in the various flavours of Internet Explorer. But for the most part I have always developed on a host OS. I guess I just haven’t felt comfortable developing on a virtual machine.
But this time things are different. Windows Server 2008 x64 with Hyper-V has the potential of changing all this. You now have an OS that supports hardware virtualization all in a 64 bit environment.
Last week I got my visa out and decided to buy a new hard disk for my laptop and installed Windows Server 2008 x64 with Hyper-V. So far the experience is great. I now have two guest operating systems; XP Professional and Windows 7 RC. I only have 2GB of RAM limiting me to only having a single VM running at any given time but I just got off the phone and will soon have 4GB, at which time, I should be able to host up to three guest VMs. Pretty sweet!
I wanted to summarize some of my experiences I had while getting this environment up and running.
Install RTM Version of Hyper-V
I have a MSDN subscription and the version of windows 2008 server I downloaded has a pre-release of Hyper-V. Make sure you upgrade to RTM.
Install Latest BIOS Version
This is good practise anyways. Go to your vendor and install the latest version of BIOS.
Enable Hardware Virtualization
Run your BIOS setup program and make sure that the virtualization option is enabled. By default Dell has this option disabled. This is a must if you want to use Hyper-V.
Install x64 Display Drivers
This one is optional but necessary if you want to get the most of your display. The M65 has a WUXGA (1920x1200) display. The generic drivers that are installed by windows server 2008 only support 1200x1024, certainly not ideal! Finding a x64 driver for the nVidia Quadro FX350 was time consuming. nVidia doers not provide one and the Vista x64 from them won’t install. After many hours of googling I finally found a driver that works. I am currently using XFastest-177.85 Vista64 driver and I am back to 1920x1200.
Configure Windows Server 2008 Desktop Experience
This is purely optional. If you like a desktop experience then you should enable this feature.
Connect using RDC
Again optional, but connecting to a VM using Hyper-V has a display limitation of 1600x1200. If you want to get maximum resolution when running a VM then connect using RDC. Using RDC also has the added advantage of enabled audio. I have yet to find a way of enabling audio for a VM running in Hyper-V. To get RDC to work you will still need to start the VM from Hyper-V. Once the VM has started, start RDC and connect to that VM.
So far my experience with Windows Server 2008 x64 has been very positive. The VM’s have been responsive. The only complaint I have so far is video playback or animation running in a browser, it’s slow but acceptable. Not a huge issue as I can always run my browser in the host OS.