7 ms·

I second this. My team uses whatever they want. We have Windows users, OS X, and Linux. As long as virtualbox or vmware runs on your system, we don't care what

I second this. My team uses whatever they want. We have Windows users, OS X, and Linux. As long as virtualbox or vmware runs on your system, we don't care what the host OS is.

rabh 16y ago
What sort of work do you guys do? Also how bad is the speed hit? From this: http://superuser.com/questions/146623/performance-impact-of-running-linux-in-a-virtual-machine-in-windows http://superuser.com/questions/146623/performance-impact-of-... it seems like it'd be noticeable (20% I/O hit).
- GeneralMaximus 16y ago
  The post you linked to says the most noticeable hit is going to be disk I/O. Does your app do heavy disk I/O? If not, you have nothing to worry about. The CPU hit is barely noticeable in regular use, especially if you have Core2 or i3/5/7 machines. VMs are fast enough these days. So fast, in fact, that I'm regularly blown away by them even though I use them so much.
  - rabh 16y ago
    Thanks for the info. We're not concerned about disk I/O but the app does have heavy network I/O. (though latency rather than bandwidth is the main concern). Also, I assume for virtualization you are talking about the worst case (perf-wise): running Linux in a VM inside another operating system? Rather than the better one of having a hypervisor directly manage both the user's main OS (win/osx) and linux?
    - GeneralMaximus 16y ago
      > Also, I assume for virtualization you are talking about the worst case (perf-wise): running Linux in a VM inside another operating system? Rather than the better one of having a hypervisor directly manage both the user's main OS (win/osx) and linux? Yes. I usually run Linux and WinXP on top of OS X and WinXP on top of Linux. Works great! EDIT: I use VirtualBox OSE. VMWare works even better if you can afford it. Sometimes I use Qemu for trying out toy operating systems, but I find it too slow for actual work.
- reynolds 16y ago
  We do web dev. The pain point for me is having to use rsync to "deploy" to the vm every time I make a change. That's a pretty decent tradeoff though when the alternative is maintaining tons of different development configurations on your host machine. Our local deploy process is mostly scripted so it's not much of a pain point to have to redeploy new changes.
  - rabh 16y ago
    Is it necessary to sync? I'm liking the VM ideas people have been talking about here; is it possible to just mount the guest OS' file system on the host (perhaps by running an NFS server in the VM) and develop directly on it?
    - michaelbuckbee 16y ago
      Yes, but this is highly dependent on the VM app you are running and the OS you are running it on. At a previous job I mounted drives over SSH from a windows host to a VMWare linux.
  - swombat 16y ago
    VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion both allow you to share folders from your host OS to the VMs, you know?

I second this. My team uses whatever they want. We have Windows users, OS X, and Linux. As long as virtualbox or vmware runs on your system, we don't care what the host OS is.

rabh 16y ago

What sort of work do you guys do? Also how bad is the speed hit? From this: http://superuser.com/questions/146623/performance-impact-of-running-linux-in-a-virtual-machine-in-windows http://superuser.com/questions/146623/performance-impact-of-... it seems like it'd be noticeable (20% I/O hit).

GeneralMaximus 16y ago
The post you linked to says the most noticeable hit is going to be disk I/O. Does your app do heavy disk I/O? If not, you have nothing to worry about. The CPU hit is barely noticeable in regular use, especially if you have Core2 or i3/5/7 machines. VMs are fast enough these days. So fast, in fact, that I'm regularly blown away by them even though I use them so much.
- rabh 16y ago
  Thanks for the info. We're not concerned about disk I/O but the app does have heavy network I/O. (though latency rather than bandwidth is the main concern). Also, I assume for virtualization you are talking about the worst case (perf-wise): running Linux in a VM inside another operating system? Rather than the better one of having a hypervisor directly manage both the user's main OS (win/osx) and linux?
  - GeneralMaximus 16y ago
    > Also, I assume for virtualization you are talking about the worst case (perf-wise): running Linux in a VM inside another operating system? Rather than the better one of having a hypervisor directly manage both the user's main OS (win/osx) and linux? Yes. I usually run Linux and WinXP on top of OS X and WinXP on top of Linux. Works great! EDIT: I use VirtualBox OSE. VMWare works even better if you can afford it. Sometimes I use Qemu for trying out toy operating systems, but I find it too slow for actual work.
reynolds 16y ago
We do web dev. The pain point for me is having to use rsync to "deploy" to the vm every time I make a change. That's a pretty decent tradeoff though when the alternative is maintaining tons of different development configurations on your host machine. Our local deploy process is mostly scripted so it's not much of a pain point to have to redeploy new changes.
- rabh 16y ago
  Is it necessary to sync? I'm liking the VM ideas people have been talking about here; is it possible to just mount the guest OS' file system on the host (perhaps by running an NFS server in the VM) and develop directly on it?
  - michaelbuckbee 16y ago
    Yes, but this is highly dependent on the VM app you are running and the OS you are running it on. At a previous job I mounted drives over SSH from a windows host to a VMWare linux.
- swombat 16y ago
  VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion both allow you to share folders from your host OS to the VMs, you know?