Contents tagged with Virtual PC
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My Boot-to-VHD experiment: found some tips, like it, but still haven’t found VM nirvana
I’ve recently been running some early releases developer tools which came with the “install on VM’s if you don’t want your computer to catch fire” warning. That seemed like a good time to back off on my “VM’s are for sissies” stance and get my VHD on. After verifying that there wasn’t already a suitable VHD available for download, I decided to follow Scott Hanselman’s directions to set up a Boot To VHD instance.
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Running the Mono VMWare image in VirtualPC
A lot of people love VMWare, but it bugs me. I think the main reason is that it installs with a bunch of Windows services that run automatically, every second my computer is running, whether or not I use VMWare. Since I don't use virtual machines every day, that's annoying. So, after running the free VMWare Player for a few times times, I banished it from my computer.
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We should be virtualizing Applications, not Machines
One of the benefits of my new job at Vertigo Software is that I have more frequent opportunities to talk with my co-worker, Jeff Atwood. If everything goes right, we argue... because if we agree, neither of us is going to learn anything. Recently, we argued about virtual machines. I think machine virtualization is hugely oversold. We let the technical elegance (gee whiz, a program that lets me pretend to run another computer as another program!) distract us from the fact that virtual machines are a sleazy, inelegant hack.
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Can Operating Systems tell if they're running in a Virtual Machine?
Or, do androids know they're dreaming of electric sheep...
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Installing Windows Vista October CTP (Build 5231) on VPC with VM Additions
I installed the Windows Vista October CTP (Build 5231) on Virtual PC yesterday. There were a few gotchas that I thought I'd share in case it saves anyone else some time.
- Virtual PC can't capture an ISO image greater than 2.2 GB, so you need to use something like Daemon Tools on your host machine to mount the ISO as a virtual drive, then capture it as a physical drive in VPC.
- Vista won't install on a RAW partition, which is what an unformatted VPC Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) image gives you. You can do some tricky commandline DISKPART stunts, or you can just create the partition in the install process knowing that Vista still won't like it, reboot the VPC instance, and this time VPC will recognize the partition it created. I went with the second option.
- This Vista build can't access Windows Update. You just get a message saying you need to use Automatic Updates and tells you how to set that up. Knowing that unpatched machines on the net can get haxxor'd in 20 minutes on average, I set the Auto Update time to the next hour and disabled the VPC network connection until that time. Silly me, there weren't any Auto Updates since it had just been released, but I still think minimizing Internet time before patching a machine is the best plan.
- The VPC VM Additions Installation hangs on this Vista build, and the graphics are absolute hell without them (640x480 at 8 bit, I believe). The trick is as follows: leave the hung installation running, go into the Control Panel and remove the VGA Display Driver, and say Okay when prompted to reboot. When the system comes back up, you'll have the state of the art S3 Trio display driver. It got wiggy on me when I tried to change the Display Resolution, so I rebooted again and was able to change the resolution and things were great. Dog slow, but great. If you cancel the install or kill the wrong msiexec process, the install rolls back and the drivers get removed, causing the magic not to happen.
- I kind of lied about the VM Additions. The video drivers are installed, and they make a big difference, but the rest of the VM Additions aren't installed. That means no folder sharing, etc. They might release VM Additions for Vista Beta 1, but I'm not holding my breath.
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MSDN Subscriptions - Visual Studio 2005 Team System Beta 2 VPC
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Your system has no paging file...
My computer crashed hard a week ago. I repaired the Windows install, but since then I've been getting the following message when any of the three interactive users logs on:
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[VPC] Compressing VHD files
As mentioned some time ago, we're shuttling VHD files around the office to share preconfigured developer environments. Even precompacted, VHD files are still pretty huge - 5 to 10 GB. They can compress down quite a bit, though - as much as 70% or so.
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[VPC] Using Virtual PC for developer portability
I've been using VPC quite a bit lately. At work, we've got a few applications which can take days to get set up for development - one app is ASP.NET mixed with VB DCOM on DB2, another is even more confusing. Both take a few days to configure, and that's if you follow the directions and ask the guys who built it. That kills developer portability - a 30 minute bug fix becomes a 30 hour bug fix if the developer hasn't gone through the installation initiatiation on that system yet.
