Solo Developer Success

I have always used my own personal computer for all of my development work, both as an employee and as a contract developer. This would make for one crowded laptop containing multiple development tools, project files, databases, etc.   Invariably there would come a day when I would have to migrate to a new computer or upgraded hard drive, reinstall everything due to crash, or lose hours fixing some broken aspect of my development environment.  I have lost days of billable time in the past trying to get everything back up and running so I could get back to work.  I had to find a better way.  I needed to separate my personal usage, employer work, and client work in order to minimize risk and maintain my sanity.

For awhile, I tried using two computers for development, my main laptop for personal work and employer-related development, and a desktop for all other client development.  Invariably, I would be out of town with my laptop and in need of working on the desktop system. Remote access was an option but not always possible. I needed to find a solution that would allow me to keep my different development environments separate, yet on the same computer.

That’s where VMWare entered the picture. I created two virtual machines, each running Windows XP on a laptop running Vista.  My Client VM has Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, Visual FoxPro, Word, Excel, tsWebEditor and a few other tools.  My Employer VM has Clarion Enterprise 6.2, Visual Studio 2005, tsWebEditor, Word, Excel, and SQL Server.  Each VM is configured to run using about 700Mb of RAM.  My laptop has 3Gb of RAM which means I can run both virtual machines simultaneously with little degradation in performance.

Each VM is less then 40Gb and is backed up (copied) nightly to an external drive for safe keeping.  Migrating to a new machine, upgrading to a larger hard drive, or recovering from a crash is now a much easier task, requiring only that I install the software on my laptop main OS, restore my personal files, and then restore the VM backups.  In the case of a total hardware failure, I can plug my external backup drive into another computer, run VMWare Player and be back up and working in no time.

This also allows experimenting with software or migrating to new versions of a development environment easier.  I can create a new Virtual Machine running XP Pro in about 45 minutes and use it to try out new software, test an upgrade, etc.  When finished, I simply delete the VM and, if necessary, incorporate the new software into the appropriate development environment.  I could do the same using a backup copy of an existing VM to test compability with a development environment upgrade.

Recently I tried out MokaFive as an alternative to VMWare.  More on that later.