Recently, a short article came across my desk relating a story about a fellow who changes his laptop every few months and to overcome the hastle of reinstalling his apps and environment each time, he uses VMWare to house his environment and moves it to the new laptop. Great idea!

   Well its not that easy to do as I am finding out. There are decisions to be made and trial and error to get the decisions right. My laptop is a AMD 64 dual core machine with 160GB drive. My requirements are to work with Office applications some of the time and development applications other times. Perhaps I will even want to run games some of the time of do other things. So my first question is do I run one VM (virutal machine) that takes up all of the drive space or do create serveral small VMs customized to a set of tasks?

   What this fellow did apparently was the former, creating a large VM and installing every application he needed in one environment. I believe it to be easier but not what I can see I need. WinXP like all previous Windows environments easily becomes thick over time with crud and my instinct was to often wipe the drive clean and reinstall all. but with so many apps and so much data it seemed to never happend. My prior laptop, a 16" Vaio, was never once reformatted from the time I bought it in 2002 until just weeks ago. There is no reason to think that if I use one large VM I will every replace it. If I use smaller VMs where the OS has already been installed as part of the VM cloning process, I stand a chance to get rid of a smaller sluggish VM. Too, as part of this thinking, I would store static files, no applications to the host drive and access them through VM shared folders.

   Steps to take, in theory:

1. Install VMWare version 6 (beta) workstation.
2. Create a Vista 64 VM; install Vista and update it with host computer drivers and updates.
3. Clone this VM, naming it for the kind of work it will be used for.
4. Install applications and clone a backup.
5. Work happily ever after.

   As you might guess this has not worked out as planned but one has to be able to continue in the face of disappointment until you succeed. Yeah, right! Installing VMWare was easy, it is like every prior version run the setup, answer a few questions that can be changed later and the hypervisor is ready to go.

   Creating Vista 64 VMs is the first place where this became trying, my desire was to create an 8 GB VM disk to hold Vista. After creating the VM, installing Vista halted early in the process when VMware reported back that the minimum size of the disk would need to be 8.5GB and I just didn't have a VM disk that size. I scapped the VM and created a new one at 10GB. Once again installing Vista, VMWare reported that the minimum would need to be 12.120GB and VMWare still cannot expand disks. This meant that I had to scrap this VM too and create a new one - a new one with 12.120 GB. This time I created one with 14GB and it worked!

   The amount of work so far was not that much, I never went through the install process of Vista until the last time, what happened on the first two attempts was a problem early in the process. This is a beta version VMware so hopefully my report back to them as well as others will be of help.

   Once I had a working Vista VM, the disk space was nearly 5GB and I found that to be disappointing, so much disk space for an OS - oiy! I cloned it so that I could create an Office VM for Microsoft Office products and then installed the Office 2007 applications. This went off without much of a problem and gave me the sense that this would work fine. I would have to move the backup VMs to a mass storage device to keep my laptop lean and mean but I could have different VMs that can be gotten rid of without much worry since they had only so much installation time invested in them.

   The next VM would be a development VM housing Visual Studio 2005 Professional and other packages to further my consulting work. The 14GB VM starting at 5GB of used space grew to 13.7GB without all the updates needed and this very much disappointed me. There is no guidance available for how much disk space one has when installing packages other than the incremental guidance provided by the tools at each step. Had I known that Vista 64 and VS2005Pro would max out my VM, I would just create a larger VM from the start. Of course it would be nice if VMware would engineer their product so that the VM disk can be grown.

   My next step is to retry the who experiment from scratch with a larger VM disk from the start. I wonder, is 20GB enough space to create a development envionrment? One other thing, VS2005 insists it knows where files should be placed on your disk and this is problematic. Why cannot static files like the product documentation be put on the shared folders rather than the virtual C: disk? If I could put static content on the host disk rather than the VM disk, the VM could remain small and nimble. Perhaps I should mention this to MS?

   More about this once I get it all to work.