Craig Lussier

I recently purchased a new computer for my home office that has a 2.66 Intel Core 2 Quad processor, 8GB of dual channel DDR2 RAM and 1TB of hard drive space. I also have an external 500GB hard drive making a total of 1.5TB of hard drive space in my environment which really comes in handy.

When I was shopping around for a new computer that would fit my requirements, I got the sense that many home computers on the market targeted to home users are simply way overpowered for what the average user would ever utilize. No average user would ever push the machine I purchased anywhere near its capacity in terms of processing power not to mention that most software does not use 2 cores never mind 4 cores. With that said, I knew I'd be able to push this hardware to the limit as a developer.

So my machine came bundled with Vista Home Premium x64. This wasn't good enough for what I wanted to do so I quickly upgraded it to Vista Ultimate x64. I happen to like Vista as my home OS (for fun and gaming), but I needed something more powerful with a bigger bag of tricks for a development environment. Enter Windows Server 2008 x64 Enterprise Edition into the picture. My first impression of this server is it is awesome! I would not consider myselft to be a network or server guy, but I easily setup my machine to have a dual boot configuration with Vista Ultimate x64 and Server 2008 Enterprise x64. I am very pleased that Hyper-V is a native part of Server 2008 (x64 editions), and it just what I needed for a great single machine development environment.

I have many virtual machines for different scenarios, but at most times I have the following guests running:

• XP Professional (x86) with Visual Studio Team Suite 2005 & 2008
• Vista Ultimate (x64) with Visual Studio Team Suite 2005 & 2008
• Server 2008 Enterprise x64 running Office SharePoint Server 2007 (for a great discussion on setting this up see Eli Robillard's blog post on setting up a SharePoint development machine. Its targeted at Windows Server 2003 R2 but it will certainly help)
• Server 2008 Enterprise x64 running Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
• Server 2008 Enterprise x64 running SQL Server 2005 Enterprise

In the past I've tried Virtual PC or Virtual Server 2005 R2 but I wasn't overly satisfied with performance and at this point I can't use them for my purposes anyway as I wanted to try all the x64 atchitectures and both products don't support x64 guests. The Hyper-V role in Server 2008 makes all the difference as it supports hardware virtualization for both x86 and x64 guests. You need to make sure that your processor supports virtualization (most new processors on the market do). Also, you'll need to modify your BIOS to enable virtualization as this is generally disabled by default before installing the Hyper-V role in Server 2008.

I setup my host Server 2008 as a domain controller so I have a very basic domain, active directory and dns server setup. This makes my environment feel more like a real network as all virtual machines are on this domain. A big shout out and many thanks the network guys at my workplace for guiding me through setting up my domain and making it work 'right'.

After running this setup for a little while, the only perceived issues I have are hard drive read/write speeds and RAM allocation. My motherboard supports 8GB and all slots are full. This is not to say that these are really issues at all for my purposes, but it would run even better on a production server class machine.

I am excited and pleased with this setup and honestly for a techie like me, with all things considered, it is close to a dream come true for a single machine home office development environment.

So has anyone pushed Hyper-V for their development environments? I'd like to hear from you if you have experiences to share. If you have not and have an opportunity to try it, I'd highly recommend it.

Cheers,

C.

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