Choosing between XP Mode and VMware for development on Windows 7

Question

I'm a programmer, and am about to upgrade to a new Windows 7 machine (quad, 4GB). Problem is some of my dev tools (e.g. PowerBuilder) do not support 7. I'm thinking about using either XP Mode or VMware as the dev platform for such tools. I've never used 7 or VMware, and have wondered:

1. Is there a difference in terms of performance between XP Mode and VMware? Dev tools are heavy, and I'd like to get as much as possible from the hardware (couldn't care less about graphics, though).
2. Is there a difference in terms of interaction with the main machine?
3. If I'll be using VMware, I'd love to have several images I can load - development tools, clean OS install, some servers etc. They don't have to run concurrently - each is for a different task. Can this be somehow done with XP Mode?
4. Can single files be accessed from the main machine (for backups or so) in either XP Mode or VMware? From Jeff Atwood's recent story I understand that backing up VMware is tricky. Is it the same with XP Mode? (I do use source control, but still)

Bottom line: is using a virtual machine to run my main development platform a good idea?

Answer 1

You'll have a lot more versatility with a standalone VM product vs XP mode, since XP mode can only do one thing - be XP mode. XP mode is really just designed for application compatibility, not for managing a virtual infrastructure. A good VM manager will let you build whatever infrastructure you need, spanning as many VMs as you need.

My suggestion would be to purchase the proper version of Windows 7 for XP mode, to give your self the option of using it, and plan on implementing VMWare Workstation into your development workflow. You'll still need to acquire the proper licenses for using with VMs, but you may already have access through MSDN or similar.

Answer 2

Make sure your new CPU supports hardware virtualisation, otherwise you can forget about the XP Mode option. Most recent AMD chips do, but a fair number of recent Intel don't regardless of the number of cores.

Answer 3

Our developers all use VMware server or workstation and sometimes VMware player for development. We have always found VMware to be more intuitive then Virtual PC or Virtual Server. That being said we haven't tested using XP Mode. But I get the feeling XP Mode was not meant to be used in this matter. I would still recommend usng VMWare to anyone who asked my opinion.

Answer 4

I'd recommend VMWare Workstation (Jeff's experience looks like something unfortunate rather than something tricky about VMWare). Workstation's ability to take snapshots is the killer feature for me. I only back up a couple of important VM's that's just a case of shutting down the VM and running rsync to make a copy to an external drive. I can then run the VM from the external drive to check all is ok. My impression is that XP seems to run more smoothly in VMWare than it did on the raw hardware. Workstation has some hooks into development tools like eclipse and Visual Studio and the ability to record and playback a VM looks really useful (though I don't use that personally). I find VMWare Workstation to be good value for money. You've also got the choice of VMWare Server or Sun VirtualBox if you want free as in beer.

Answer 5

I also have to throw this out there, have you tried to run it natively in Win7? It's backwards native support is very powerful, even on a machine that I had owned for 3-4 years and I upgraded to Win7 I did not end up with a single incompatibility. The only thing that was very finicky were my motherboard's on board sound card driver software but even that eventually was working fine.

Answer 6

My colleagues in the US run all their deevlopment on VMs, they have a VM per version of our product. Personally, I think this isn't ideal as Visual Studio runs like a dog at the best of times, but it does work to prevent conflicts.

For older development environments (eg Powerbuilder, VB6 etc) then a VM would work fine.

They use VMware, even though they seem to worship at the altar of Microsoft. That should tell you something about the relative merits of the virtualisation providers. VMWare Workstation is a wonderful tool, its multiple snapshots tool is designed for you - build your base image, then snapshot it to give you a dev environment, test environment, etc all based on the same image.

Backing up VMware is simplicity itself. Shutdown or suspend your image, copy the files. Done. If you want to partial backup your guest OS to the host disk, you can add a drive that maps directly to a physical HDD, bypassing the virtual drives you normally get in a VM.