Tuesday 31 May 2011

Virtual desktops via Virtual Machines

I’ve got recently a very decent laptop (Lenovo W520, 16GB RAM) and one of the fastest SSDs on the market(Vertex 3 240GB). The machine is flying and basically does whatever I ask it to do in no time :).
I’ve always wanted to keep client projects, my personal projects and the rest (Outlook, pictures, etc) fully isolated. The main reason being the fact that every project requires some specific setup that I don’t want to keep forever and re-installing the whole machine after each piece of work doesn’t appeal to me. On top of that I don’t want to limit myself and don’t play with the latest technology just because it might break something on my system and I won’t be able to work.
So I’ve created 2 VMs. One for my personal stuff(VS, Ruby, Erlang, but no Outlook) and one for my current client. The idea is that I will create a separate VM for each new client. Another advantage of this approach is that if something happens to my laptop I can copy the VM to a different machine and be up and running within minutes. I backup all VMs twice a week to an external disk using CrashPlan. A nice side effect of using CrashPlan is that I get versioning so in case of emergency I don’t have to go all the way back to the initial state of the VM.
The VMs are obviously not as fast as the host with IO being the main bottleneck but they are fast enough so I can work comfortably. I can even run 2 VMs at the same time and they both start within seconds and are responsive enough so I can have fully functional VS open in each of them.
Have a look at screenshots from CrystalDiskMark to see the IO performance drop.



I started the whole experiment a week ago so we will see how it goes. Drop me a line if you know how to squeeze more performance out of VirtualBox.