Just recently I decided to move all of my projects to a virtual machine running Ubuntu 10 as the guest. So far I have noticed only a slight difference in performance between the host and guest OS. Development using a VM is convenient because you do not need reinstall packages if your HD crashes or you migrate to a new OS. I also contemplated the security gain of the development environment but I'm still curious what the benefits are in terms of security. I'm guessing you disconnect from the internet inside the VM your relatively safe from attack.

Yeah that's how I use Ubuntu when I needed it for a class. I'm normally ssh'ed to servers though instead which I find more convenient. You don't really need a GUI for doing anything important in Ubuntu. Virtual box's seamless mode is nice though.

I personally do my code under Windows in Visual Studio cause the IDE is way better. I only boot my virtual machine (Ubuntu under VMWares) when I want to compile retail. I use a SVN server to transfer code.

I also don't care much about security. I'm on my personal network with a router and a firewall, that's more than enough.

As for running a VM all the time I find it stupid, you loose a lot of speed (cpu, hard drive) and ram. You also lose most hardware specific features implemented in drivers, like for example Compiz (cause you have a vmware software video adapter instead of your real nvidia card).

What about backup? You backup your whole 10gb+ VM each time? Much easier to backup only your source file. Also, if you hard drive get bad sectors, if it's 1 files on millions it's no big lost, but if it happens on your VM file your done for.

In personal usage, no. I have two configured VMs (Ubuntu, Fedora) and may add a few more (Windows 7?), all to enable me to test multi-platform software under other OSes. I've honestly never considered virtualizing my host OS (Mac OS X).

In professional usage, I've done some Windows-on-Windows virtualization for both development and deployment purposes, and I've worked at places where you start hacking on a project by installing a pre-configured VM that provides a stable base. Typically these are for either network-bound applications or applications intended for blade environments, where virtualization is a prerequisite anyway.

I don't consider VMs relevant as a security measure, though. All of my VMs, ever, have had shared network access with the host. In fact, I usually set up networking between guest and host as well as shared folders to enable various forms of testing (using the host as a "remote server" from within the guest via the hosts file, for instance).

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi
[...]In fact, I usually set up networking between guest and host as well as shared folders to enable various forms of testing (using the host as a "remote server" from within the guest via the hosts file, for instance).

If you're using vmware workstation (perhaps fusion has it also?), vm teams provide superior features for testing networking issues, as you can create team-only LANs and specify bandwidth and packet loss values.

Personally, at home, I use Windows 7 as my host OS, but I strongly dislike most of the UI changes, so I do almost everything in separate windows XP vms. I have one for browsing the internet and for email (with multiple virus scanners running simultaneously), one for communication systems like IRC that I want running even when I suspend the browsing VM, several different ones for development (one with VS and Komodo for PC software development in C++ and Python, one with MPLAB and Xilinx ISE for hardware and non-PC software development, one with various tools like nLite for making customized OS images, etc), and a few for playing games that I don't want polluting my host (some games do nasty things to the systems they run on).

I also have many VMs with various n?x and bsd operating systems, but I only fire them up when I'm feeling masochistic.

Quote: Original post by francoispress
[...]I also contemplated the security gain of the development environment but I'm still curious what the benefits are in terms of security. I'm guessing you disconnect from the internet inside the VM your relatively safe from attack.

VMs that are properly isolated are safer, in that if you get malware on them you can usually just revert to a snapshot and be all fixed. However, VMs are not a guarantee of safety - most VM systems can be escaped these days (like any software, staying updated to the latest version can help). If you're going to have it share networking with the host, and/or share folders, though, it's still about as safe as having another computer on your network with access to your shares (meaning not really safe, but still not quite as bad as running stuff on your host)

Quote: Original post by Extrarius

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi
[...]In fact, I usually set up networking between guest and host as well as shared folders to enable various forms of testing (using the host as a "remote server" from within the guest via the hosts file, for instance).

If you're using vmware workstation (perhaps fusion has it also?), vm teams provide superior features for testing networking issues, as you can create team-only LANs and specify bandwidth and packet loss values.

That's a really cool feature. I'm using VirtualBox, though, but I'll keep it in mind for the next time I have a Windows workstation environment and need a VM setup.

I was thinking not just security but convenience. On my VM I have a bunch of packages installed and configured. If for some reason I decided to change machine in the future I wouldn't have to reinstall anything. Just copy the VM image and run the VM. The cross platform stuff is awesome!

I use VMWare Player (free) regularly for testing software releases (SlimDX/SlimTune), and for running server environments (Linux and Windows both) that I don't want to configure on my regular machine. I've considered switching over to a fully virtualized environment for my main work, but VM handling of graphics still seems pretty sketchy.