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Setting up a vm may sound 'scatterbrained' to you but depending on the complexity of the environment they might see it as an essential task. Repeating what's be

Setting up a vm may sound 'scatterbrained' to you but depending on the complexity of the environment they might see it as an essential task. Repeating what's been said: you need to consider that they are finding flaws in your DevOps/Engineering practices.

falcolas 12y ago
Pretty low on the page, and not management focused, but this is quite important if you're writing anything but the frontend component of webapps. If you're developing locally on, say, a Mac, but you're pushing your code to production on Ubuntu Linux, those VMs are going to save you money by preventing bugs in the long term. Of course, with modern development tools like Vagrant and Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Salt, setting up a VM should be quick and easy (and be something you can get one person to do and share their results with the rest of the team).
- eurekin 12y ago
  Do You know of any good examples of how to do it? I was once considering creating a VM for each of my side projects, but unfortunately, I found they are tightly configured to the hosting environment! It's most probably my mistake, so maybe you could answer how to avoid following: * I thought I could share VMs across computers, but having created a VM with hardware virtualization made tied it to a Intel Host with the virtualization extension. At home I have some laptops which are AMD's and don't support it. * Is there a way to setup a whole VM from a script, including network card tunnels and shared folders? * Is it possible to access a project environment, within a linux VM, which requires a Windows domain authentication? I guess it didn't work for me, since the requests originating from the VM lacked the necessary NTLM headers.
  - mrj 12y ago
    You should look into vagrant. It can help you with many of these things, essentially just providing a framework to get started. Writing the bootstrapping scripts will still be up to you, but it helps. For ntlm there are a lot of solutions for Linux, but the one I have used was cntlm to give me a local proxy to call through for convenience.
    - eurekin 12y ago
      A proxy! Ah, why I never thought of that, so simple... Thank You
  - kyllo 12y ago
    Have you heard of Vagrant? http://vagrantup.com/ http://vagrantup.com/ I'm not sure about the NTLM part (and I understand NTLM is basically deprecated at this point, you should use Kerberos instead) but I believe it does everything else you're asking for.
  - falcolas 12y ago
    As mrj and kyllo said, Vagrant. It takes care of the VM setup (including memory and disk allocations, shared folders, and basic access), and provides hooks for scripts to set up the rest. In my case, I favor Ansible for setting up the rest of the VM, as opposed to shell scripts. It automates package installs, configuration changes, and managing services. Once these two bits are configured properly (about a day's task, for a moderately complex system) Vagrant can re-build a development VM from scratch in about 10 minutes. Best part? Once you have the CM scripts nailed down, you can use them to build your staging and production environments in the same way your local VM was built.
    - eurekin 12y ago
      Seems it might help in my current case... On my local dev machine I've replicated a project environment (Jenkins, Sonar, Artifactory, SCMManager). It was a huge boost for some tasks and I'm considering moving it out of my machine for others to use as well. If I do so, than I would probably configure it all manually, again from scratch. Do You recommend making it a Vagrant recipe this time? Are there any similar ones?
  - gvb 12y ago
    Sounds like there be dragons that I would like to avoid. I'm curious what your environment is: * VM host machine OS (Windows/linux/OSX)? * Virtual machine (HyperV/VMware/KVM/...)? * Guest OS (Windows/linux/OSX)? Thanks!
    - eurekin 12y ago
      So, my host is mostly Windows (work laptop comes with it normally and at home I like to play games a lot). The VM was VirtualBox. The Guest OS I always used was Ubuntu Desktop (I remember starting with around ~10.10).
eurekin 12y ago
That was my immediate thought as well. I can see few scenarios which could justify having the VM's. I'm also very wary about those "super productive" two other guys. One should at least consider that they unwillingly make the quality bad (and thus maintenance harder). Unfortunately, some really bad technical solutions blow up very late.
- mreiland 12y ago
  yep. dealing with one of those solutions now. The guy who wrote it is "faster than me", no doubt. The difference is the system I wrote for the company works and the system he rewrote is currently being rewritten (by me) because we couldn't get it to work for more than day without blowing up in some manner. Maybe that isn't what's happening here, but speed isn't always the most important goal.
smrtinsert 12y ago
To me it sounds like he is frankly a poor micro manager that expects his developers to have boundless enthusiasm for bugs. Also note this is a double submission his first submission didn't go well so he reposted a week later. Sounds like those two developers are job hunting to me and I would too.

falcolas 12y ago

Pretty low on the page, and not management focused, but this is quite important if you're writing anything but the frontend component of webapps. If you're developing locally on, say, a Mac, but you're pushing your code to production on Ubuntu Linux, those VMs are going to save you money by preventing bugs in the long term. Of course, with modern development tools like Vagrant and Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Salt, setting up a VM should be quick and easy (and be something you can get one person to do and share their results with the rest of the team).

eurekin 12y ago
Do You know of any good examples of how to do it? I was once considering creating a VM for each of my side projects, but unfortunately, I found they are tightly configured to the hosting environment! It's most probably my mistake, so maybe you could answer how to avoid following: * I thought I could share VMs across computers, but having created a VM with hardware virtualization made tied it to a Intel Host with the virtualization extension. At home I have some laptops which are AMD's and don't support it. * Is there a way to setup a whole VM from a script, including network card tunnels and shared folders? * Is it possible to access a project environment, within a linux VM, which requires a Windows domain authentication? I guess it didn't work for me, since the requests originating from the VM lacked the necessary NTLM headers.
- mrj 12y ago
  You should look into vagrant. It can help you with many of these things, essentially just providing a framework to get started. Writing the bootstrapping scripts will still be up to you, but it helps. For ntlm there are a lot of solutions for Linux, but the one I have used was cntlm to give me a local proxy to call through for convenience.
  - eurekin 12y ago
    A proxy! Ah, why I never thought of that, so simple... Thank You
- kyllo 12y ago
  Have you heard of Vagrant? http://vagrantup.com/ http://vagrantup.com/ I'm not sure about the NTLM part (and I understand NTLM is basically deprecated at this point, you should use Kerberos instead) but I believe it does everything else you're asking for.
- falcolas 12y ago
  As mrj and kyllo said, Vagrant. It takes care of the VM setup (including memory and disk allocations, shared folders, and basic access), and provides hooks for scripts to set up the rest. In my case, I favor Ansible for setting up the rest of the VM, as opposed to shell scripts. It automates package installs, configuration changes, and managing services. Once these two bits are configured properly (about a day's task, for a moderately complex system) Vagrant can re-build a development VM from scratch in about 10 minutes. Best part? Once you have the CM scripts nailed down, you can use them to build your staging and production environments in the same way your local VM was built.
  - eurekin 12y ago
    Seems it might help in my current case... On my local dev machine I've replicated a project environment (Jenkins, Sonar, Artifactory, SCMManager). It was a huge boost for some tasks and I'm considering moving it out of my machine for others to use as well. If I do so, than I would probably configure it all manually, again from scratch. Do You recommend making it a Vagrant recipe this time? Are there any similar ones?
- gvb 12y ago
  Sounds like there be dragons that I would like to avoid. I'm curious what your environment is: * VM host machine OS (Windows/linux/OSX)? * Virtual machine (HyperV/VMware/KVM/...)? * Guest OS (Windows/linux/OSX)? Thanks!
  - eurekin 12y ago
    So, my host is mostly Windows (work laptop comes with it normally and at home I like to play games a lot). The VM was VirtualBox. The Guest OS I always used was Ubuntu Desktop (I remember starting with around ~10.10).

eurekin 12y ago

That was my immediate thought as well. I can see few scenarios which could justify having the VM's. I'm also very wary about those "super productive" two other guys. One should at least consider that they unwillingly make the quality bad (and thus maintenance harder). Unfortunately, some really bad technical solutions blow up very late.

mreiland 12y ago
yep. dealing with one of those solutions now. The guy who wrote it is "faster than me", no doubt. The difference is the system I wrote for the company works and the system he rewrote is currently being rewritten (by me) because we couldn't get it to work for more than day without blowing up in some manner. Maybe that isn't what's happening here, but speed isn't always the most important goal.

smrtinsert 12y ago

To me it sounds like he is frankly a poor micro manager that expects his developers to have boundless enthusiasm for bugs. Also note this is a double submission his first submission didn't go well so he reposted a week later. Sounds like those two developers are job hunting to me and I would too.