New way of working

I am trying out a different way of working, using VMWare and Remote Desktops.

My role is primarily application developer, but I also provide 2nd and 3rd line support for all our servers and network.

The computer used for this installation is a Dell Precision 370, 3GHz, 1GB. The base host OS is a fresh install of XP Pro. On top of that is very little other than Office, and VMWare Server.

In VMWare there is an XP Pro client with all the software I use - Eclipse, SQL Ent Man, etc.

I started off by using VMWare's Server Console, but it was a p.i.t.a. as it doesn't seem to transition between host and client as smoothly as it could. Also, I was hugely disappointed that VMWare doesn't support multiple monitors. Since I find that I am using Remote Desktops (the tool that comes with the MS Admin Pack) for a fair part of my day anyway, just RD'ing into the client virtual machine works perfectly well. The only issue is not being able to flick to full screen like I would be able to in VMWare's console.

So, all my development environment stuff is in the VM. At first I was using Outlook and everything else in there too, but because I can't use both screens with RD, I soon started using Outlook and other "all day" apps (like the timesheet program, trouble-ticket system, and intranet, which are all web-based) I keep open in the host, and mostly view them on the second monitor.

Copy and paste works fine for text between machines using RD. It won't c&p files though, which can be a bit of a nuisance.

To know which machine a particular window belongs to, I have turned off all themes and effects on the host OS. The client looks vanilla XP - green start button etc. I should probably switch this around so that the host is 'pretty', and the client looks more like the other servers in RD.

The client VM has D: mapped to the host's D:, which is kinda weird because it can see itself in the Virtual Machines folder. It does mean that I don't save any data on the client at all. All data, or downloaded files, go to the host or to somewhere else on the network.

The client vm uses a bridged network connection, so for all intents and purposes, it is just another PC on the network.

The two screens I use are a 20” flat panel, running at 1600x1200, and a 19” CRT, running at 1280x1024. I should just go fetch the spare 21” CRT from the server room, but it’s so far away (5 metres! ;-) )

Benefits and Sacrifices
It is quite cool to have the list of machines down the left column all the time.
Sometimes, especially when coming back out of screen-saver, the client machine can be sluggish as it swaps back into RAM. Other than that there is seldom a noticeable performance issue.
The client vm is snapshotable. Well, not really in VMWare Server, but I could still make a copy of it and be up and running elsewhere in a very short space of time. In fact that’s exactly how it started. This vm was set up on my home machine, with all the dev tools. Getting it running here was just a matter of copying the files off the DVD and pointing VMWare to the vmdk file.
Use of the dual-screens isn’t quite as optimal as it would be with a single OS.

Ok, so there are more con’s than pro’s, and I probably will get around to installing the dev tools on the host machine, but I do like the flexibility of keeping the client “portable”.


Not a very clear picture, but you get the idea...