Building my ultimate development computer (Part 1)
Since my current project is almost over, I’m starting to do more coding work. One of the things I’ve been wanting to do lately is to use virtual machines more. My desktop computer has always ended up being used for everything: e-mail, web browsing, development, games, etc. Also, like most developers, I’m constantly installing new programs and libraries…and often deleting them later. However, they frequently leave a little behind. Soon, I’ve got un-used DLLs and registry entries polluting my system. With virtual machines, I’ll be able to keep my environments separate and it will be a bit easier to keep things clean. If I want to test out some new utility or library, I can just clone my virtual machine and play around in the new sandbox.
My current computer (I should actually be calling it “my old computer”, since I already got the new one in) is fairly robust. It has a Q6600, 3 gigs of RAM, and plenty of disk space. But I figured that more RAM would be helpful when running multiple VMs, and I couldn’t go beyond 3 gigs on the motherboard. Plus, what programmer really needs much of an excuse to buy a more powerful computer? Since I’m not a hardware guy, I went out to the Hewlett-Packard site to see what I could customize. After selecting the options I wanted, it turned out that the price was much more reasonable than I expected. So, out came the company card, and a week later I was unboxing the new computer.
The machine specifications are:
HP Pavilion Elite d5000t ATX PC
- Upgrade to Genuine Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1 (64-bit)
- Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Quad processor Q9550 (2.83GHz)
- 8GB DDR2-800MHz dual channel SDRAM (4×2048)
- 1GB NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT, 2 DVI, HDMI adapter
- Wireless LAN 802.11a/b/g/n & Bluetooth(R)
- 1.5TB 7200rpm SATA 3Gb/s two hard drives (2×750GB)
- LightScribe 16X max. DVD+/-R/RW SuperMulti drive
- 15-in-1 memory card reader, 2 USB, 1394, TV video
- ATSC-NTSC TV tuner with PVR, FM tuner, remote
- Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
- HP wireless keyboard and HP wireless optical mouse
I figure that should keep me going for a year or two.
The first program I installed on it was VMware Workstation 6 for Windows for $189. From some reviews I found, it looks like this is a bit more robust than Microsoft’s VM software. My original plan for the virtual machines was to have one for Visual Studio, one for my development database server, one for my build server, etc. But I changed my mind and went with making a VM that has everything. With that, I can easily keep all work for a particular project on one VM. Once I’m done with that project, I can move the VM image to offline storage and be able to get the exact same environment back later, if needed. The two problems I see with that are that I won’t have one common source code repository, which would allow me to share code between applications easily, and I also might end up wanting to move my continuous integration build server into its own virtual machine. For now, I’ll go with what I have and see where the pain points are.
In my next post, I’ve give some details on how I set up my development virtual machines.