Like most developers I run the developer edition of CFMX locally on my laptop so i can test my code before it goes into production - i also like to have BlueDragon installed and any other CF server that may be around at any one time. However, i’ve been hit before by the nasty blue screen of death when i’ve messed something up completely unrelated to my development environment and needed to rebuild everything! Not pleasant!
Since a copy of Microsoft Virtual PC arrived on my desk sometime ago i’ve been hankering to give it a try and build a ‘development virtual server’. So now, i’ve now got a virtual Windows 2003 Server instance running developer editions of Jrun4 with CFMX and Bluedragon in their own instance. I’ve used vmWare before now and always found it a little resource hungry but that’s not the case with the MS offering, i was still able to run all my applications locally and have reasonable performance. There’s also a really neat feature called ‘Undo Disks’ - basically these are like transaction logs for the virtual pc, at the end of the session you can either decided to ditch your changes or commit your changes for the next time you boot your virtual PC.
The best bit is, if i want to move to another machine i just take my USB disk drive with my virtual pc on, install Virtual PC on the computer, configure it to read my virtual disk and hey presto up pops my virtual server.
September 15th, 2004 at 1:41 pm
Yeah i must admit this is a really sweet way to do things! I use it to demo Breeze without an internet connection - a little slow but it works a treat!
September 16th, 2004 at 5:02 am
you can speed the virtual pc up drastically by stopping all the services you’ll never need - secondary accounts, remote registry, spooler, computer browser etc etc, so much junk is running by default hogging those valuable resources!