Virtualization Tips

In the last three weeks, I’ve set up something like 6 virtual machines to play with a variety of bits and pieces of things that I come across. Virtual machines are a perfect fit for, say, setting up CouchDB to see how it works, or for giving Varnish a try. They have the distinct advantage of being more or less throw-away sandboxes, where I simply don’t have to worry about accidentally screwing things up. If I break PHP or PHPUnit on my development laptop, then I’ve got real problems; if I break it in a VM, I make a new one.

Off the top of my head, here are a few lessons learned:

  1. Buy youself a copy of VMWare Fusion. In my experience, it’s been a bit more stable than Parallels, and a lot friendlier than VirtualBox. There’s a great community around VMWare tools in general, and if you end up using virtual machines for anything more than development (deploying public applications, for instance), then you’ll literally be able to copy your VM over to a “real” server and run it without problems.

  1. Follow Brad’s excellent Ubuntu setup instructions. He walks through the process of getting a baseline JeOS machine up and running, which takes something on the order of 10 minutes.

    I’ve tried a few distros of Linux and BSD, and in my opinion, JeOS hits the sweet spot dead on. It’s a relatively small install (~1GB, all said and done), and runs very smoothly indeed with 256MB RAM. It’s chock-full of Ubuntu goodness for package installs, and relatively easy to configure.

  1. Setup linked clones to save yourself some disk space, and to make the process of spinning off new VMs as frictionless as possible. In short, this will allow you to install JeOS once, and use that install as a clean base for new machines without copying the entire disk. You’ll end up with a ~1GB base and ~100MB VMs for each of your applications, which is a huge savings indeed (especially if you want to carry a VM or two around with you on a USB stick).

    It’s a bit of a manual process at this point, but very straightforwardly explained, and easy to implement. Hopefully VMWare will expose the functionality via some sort of GUI in a future version, as they already do in Workstation.

    With linked clones, it’s trivial to bring up a new, clean VM to test something out, or to install some new component. It’s transformational: you’ll wonder how you ever got around with just one development environment.

  1. After creating clones of an Ubuntu VM, you’ll need to do a tiny bit of work to get networking up and running again. The system will be assigned a new MAC address, and get a bit confused about the references to the old virtual network card.

    Jamis Buck has described the solution in detail, and I’ve codified it into a small script. Grab that code, then just run update_copied_vm to update the hostname, hosts file, and network settings for the new VM. Piece of cake…

  1. For Windows development, browser testing, etc, visit your favourite interweb download site, and find yourself a copy of TinyXP. Clever folks have ripped all the inessential bits out of XP, meaning that it runs quickly with minimal investment of RAM and disk space. Combined with the linked clones tip above, you’ll have IE6, 7, and 8 test environments up and running in no time at all.

Developing your applications on virtual machines really does make your life simpler, and opens up opportunities for you to explore things that would have probably just been a little bit too much work to get running otherwise. It’s very much worth the up-front investment to get yourself set up.

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