A Virtual Development Server

Ahh, the Joy of Installing a New OS

If you’ve ever messed around with installing a new operating system on
the computer that you need for your work, you know how scary that is.
You never know if the box is going to boot at all, whether the data
you had on your hard drive are going to still be there when you’re
done. And what if the backup won’t read?

Trying to get Windows and Linux to dual-boot is even
worse. Nobody enjoys messing with the boot sector. And besides, if you
ever get it to work, you have to shut down one OS — close word,
close outlook, close emacs, shut down, wait, power on, wait … —
before you can start the other. And you can’t go make coffee while
this is going on, because you have to enter at just the right moment
and tell the stupid box which OS to boot. “The other one,
stupid!”

VMware takes all the pain out of those things. Well, okay, so it
doesn’t do exactly the same thing, but it does allow you to install
all the operating systems you could ever dream of on a single box. And
it lets you run them all simultaneously. That is, if you have
enough RAM and hard disk space. But that’s pretty cheap, these days.

In VMware, it’s safe

What VMware does is it emulates an Intel PC, complete with
BIOS, virtual disk drives and CD-ROM drives, network interface and
all. And everything’s simply contained in a handful files in the file
system on your computer. So if you’re about to do some screwy
operation on a virtual machine, you simply shut down or suspend the
virtual machine, copy all the files to a secure place, power up or
resume the virtual machine, and you can do all sorts of crazy shit,
and you can still restore the copy if something goes awry. Try that
with your master boot record!

If you really plan on messing things up on a regular basis, you
can even ask VMware to ask you each time you shut down whether to keep
or discard anything you did in that session. Or if the whole point is
to try to trash things, you can make it non-persistent, in which case
everything’s automatically discarded each time. This would be pretty
effective for a front-end web server, in a situation where the
database and the log files and everything else that gets updated live
on other machines. If hackers decide to pay you a visit, you can
simple power cycle the virtual machine, and everything will be back to
normal.

The Ideal Development Server

All in all, this makes VMware ideal to use for your personal
development server. When you have different clients and different
projects on a monthly basis, like I do, they usually require
different development setups. Maybe on one project, you need to
develop J2EE on Oracle. Another project is based on PostgreSQL and
OpenACS. Yet other projects must work on FreeBSD or on some particular
version of Windows. It’s all easy as pie with VMware.

The trick that works brilliantly for me, is to have, say, RedHat 7.2
with PosgreSQL, AOLserver, and the software I’m developing, running in
a virtual machine. Then I connect to that server using a standard
secure shell tool, such as <a
href=”http://www.zip.com.au/~roca/ttssh.html”>ttssh or <a
href=”http://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/”>SecureCRT, with
X11 forwarding enabled. In addition, my Windows box runs an X server,
such as <a
href=”http://www.hummingbird.com/products/nc/exceed/”>Exceed or <a
href=”http://www.microimages.com/freestuf/mix/”>MI/X. That way, I
can use Internet Explorer, Outlook, Word, Excel, WinAmp, AIM, YM, WM,
and all the other essential tools I’ve grown accustomed to, next to my
Emacs and terminal windows, for a complete, functional work and
development environment, all on one box.

The suspend feature is really handy, too. If you’re done with a
machine for a while, you don’t need to waste memory on having it
sitting idle. You can simply suspend it, and then resume it again when
you need it. And, amazingly enough, if you have open SSH or X11
connections, and you don’t mess with them while the virtual machine is
sleeping, they’ll survive the suspend/resume operation.

VMware is a bit on the expensive side, but I’ve found it to be well
worth it. It’s such a relief to be able to install a new OS on without
having to worry about whether you’ll be able to work again the next
day. And they’re not even paying me to say this!