

Why You Should Be Using Virtualisation In Your Development Environment - danw
http://morethanseven.net/2010/11/04/Why-you-should-be-using-virtualisation.html

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codypo
We're big fans of virtualized development environments at my startup. Not only
is it very helpful in preventing weird environment-related bugs like the autor
states, it's a huge shortcut when it comes to bringing new developers onboard.
Rather than have them spend hours tracking down links to all the right
versions of your various libraries and installing things in the appropriate
order, you hand them your image. For us, setup time for a new developer has
gone from about a day to about 30 minutes, and most of that is time spent
downloading Virtual Box.

In addition, if you get a little too clever and accidentally wipe out
something crucial in your environment, you just spin up a new VM. It's a
tremendous timesaver.

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johnbender
I'm assuming Mitchell hasn't seen this yet, but I'm sure I speak for both of
us when I say thank you for including Vagrant in your post.

I would like to point out a few things.

1\. Another thing to set up.

Streamlining project setup is one of Vagrant's primary goals. Instead of
putting someone, who potentially has no background with the app, through a 20
step process installing all the application dependencies you can simply tell
them to run a few commands.

2\. It's a "Ruby tool".

While I don't think your intention was to pigeon hole it, Vagrant is really
meant for any development environment/language/setup. Its just unfortunate
that the only supported provisioning tool uses Ruby for its DSL (are there
similar tools in other languages?)

(NOTE: its been a while since I contributed meaningfully to the project)

~~~
mitchellh
I did finally see this entry. It was a great read and I agree completely with
it. Note that I posted my comment on the blog directly:
[http://morethanseven.net/2010/11/04/Why-you-should-be-
using-...](http://morethanseven.net/2010/11/04/Why-you-should-be-using-
virtualisation.html#comment-94464917)

Since clicking on that just to read my comment can be annoying, I've copied it
below as well:

=========================================================

Yes! Yes Yes Yes! Virtualization for development is extremely important and
I'm glad you wrote this. Also, thanks for the hat tip to Vagrant, I appreciate
it. I've given a few talks on this and it always amazes me how many people are
so comfortable with the status quo of developing on their own machines with
apache/mysql/etc installed directly on their machines. Its a disaster waiting
to happen.

I want to point out to the many people using VMWare out there: VMWare Fusion
is great, yes, I won't argue. Their shared folders are better, again I agree.
But Vagrant does make use of NFS which is faster than even VMWare Fusion's
shared folders in order to get around VirtualBox's terrible performance.

And just because I have things to say, here are a few of my own remarks
against the arguments against virtualization of development:

* Speed - Given enough RAM (which for a standard web application, shouldn't be any more than 512 MB to 1 GB for the VM instance), the speed difference is noticeable but not detrimental to your productivity. For regular web requests you won't notice any speed difference. For CPU intensive background tasks, you'll probably see a 1.5x slowdown. Again, unless you're running 5 hour tasks during development, it shouldn't be a big deal, and the benefits outweigh these issues, in my opinion.

* Lower level than you're used to - Then get your friendly sysadmin to setup a base image to use for your site. A modern sysadmin has many scripts made to automate the setup of the environment for production. There is no reason these scripts can't be used to setup your development as well. Use it! Stay in your happy place and just boot up a VM and code! (Although its my opinion every developer should take the time to learn their software stack top to bottom)

* Something else to setup - Once. You only need to learn it once, and its repeatable and dependable. I would argue that setting up a new software stack every time a dependency changes on your web app is far more than one more "something else to setup."

* Developer workstations should be personal - Right! I agree 100%. So stop installing server crap on your personal computers. Keep your Twitter clients away from your web servers. Use a VM and keep your workstation personal.

Thanks again, Mitchell

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jonpaul
I really wish you could virtualize OS X. I would love to build a beefy Linux
box as a base machine and virtualize OS X and Windows.

It's my understanding you can do it, but it's a bit hacky, right?

~~~
widgetycrank
I ran a VMWare image of OS X a few years ago. I don't know what it's like now,
but back then the lack of an OpenGL driver was the deal breaker. OS X's
graphic shell uses Quartz Extreme on top of OpenGL, without GPU acceleration
it was virtually unusable.

~~~
epoch7
I'm running a VMWare image of 10.6 (Snow Leopard) right now. I didn't set it
up, but it does indeed run. It's not perfect. It had problems running Safari
4, but now runs Safari 5 fine. I use it for browser testing. That being said
Flash video crashes it hard, HTML5 video crashes it gently (like caressing a
child's face with a butcher knife).

I have a pretty capable machine (Core i7 920, 6GB, GTX260 video card), but
speed wise it is quite usable and I run all sorts of osx-only apps on it (like
the omni suite) every day.

So.. i guess like 7.5 out of 10? Buggy, but really getting close.

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SkyMarshal
I've also found it's generally better to keep your base installation as sparse
as possible, and use virtual machines for anything that does not absolutely
need to be on the host.

That way you can set up servers, experiment with new platforms and/or
applications, hack^Wlearn config files and system internals, etc. without risk
of bogging down or blowing up your machine and having no recourse but a full
reinstall and reconfig.

I've got core Ubuntu Server, OpenSuse, and CentOS server images, that include
extras like git-core, htop, ssh, and a few other utilities I universally
depend on, and that I can copy, deploy, and configure for whatever specialized
purpose that comes up.

<3 it.

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khingebjerg
Perhaps a middle ground could be using a virtual machine as a staging
environment?

~~~
bmj
This is what we do. The biggest benefit here, for us, is that if a release
goes horribly wrong, or our testers find a disastrous bug, we can easily roll
back to a clean state and only lose the time it takes to load the VM.

I've tried using a VM for doing development, but I've run into the issues
mentioned in the parent article: Visual Studio 2010 is memory and CPU hog.
I've maxed out the RAM in my laptop, and it still ran too slowly to be really
useful.

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JofArnold
Not strictly in the spirit of the post, but I use a nice VM setup I thoroughly
recommend:

\- Host: OSX (2.4GHz i5, 8GB ram)

\- Guest1: Ubuntu 10.10 (1.5GB ram allocated; acts as a LAMP server, available
to Host and other Guests)

\- Guest2: WinXP (1.5GB ram allocated - I use it for IE and for Xara)

This config eats RAM, but affords so many advantages:

1/ Makes my LAMP server portable. Can set up on new computer in no time

2/ Means I can experiment with server software and can revert when I break
something

3/ Enables easy cross-PLATFORM browser testing which is vital if you care
about fonts and pixels

4/ Can easily fake slow internet connections etc for web dev

5/ Gedit :P

6/ Nautilus :P

Major disadvantage is filesystem access speed.

~~~
JofArnold
PS, if anyone knows a solution to the file access speed issue (not just the
filesystem of the guest, but also what ever you share with it from the host)
please tell me. Parallels, VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox all have this issue
and it drives me mad sometimes!

~~~
reynolds
I'm not sure if this helps in your situation, but when I'm running VMware I
don't share any local directories. I use rsync to manage the virtual server
directories since it's similar to how I deploy to my remote servers.

Having to manually "deploy" code to a local virtual server can be tedious, so
running a background process that watches your local directories for changes
helps a lot.

~~~
ciniglio
Can you elaborate on that background process? Is that something built into
rsync?

~~~
reynolds
It's actually something I've been working on that I want to put up on github.
I hacked up a Python version of it as a proof-of-concept but rewrote it in C
as an installable executable using autotools.

Basically I tell it which directory I want it to watch for changes and it does
automatic syncing by piping rsync. I keep a local and remote signature of the
files and their timestamps. When it first starts up, it pulls the server sig
file and compares it to the local one. If there's a mismatch, the server is
updated. From there it manages the signatures locally until they're different.

Writing the sig file to the remote server is done in the same rsync pass
because it's stored in the local directory as a dotfile.

I realize rsync does its own checksums, but using my own crude signature files
makes it so I don't have to keep calling rsync. I only call it when something
changes.

I also have some stuff I'm working on that ties into auto-restarting servers
when syncing finishes, rolling server deployments for no downtime, db
migrations, etc.

~~~
epoch7
Sounds like some pretty cool stuff! I hope you post about it when you do
decide to release it. :)

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rdzah
Now if I could only get some vmware <-> ec2 direct compatibility up in here
... proprietary conversion tools = fail.

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FiReaNG3L
Note that its pretty much a must if you plan to have a MongoDB server as part
of your dev environment on your home box - Mongo by design eats all the RAM it
can find to map files to, and if you have Apache, Solr and MySQL running on
the same box, things can get ugly :)

~~~
someone_here
Why do applications think they can manage my memory better than my kernel?

~~~
mathias_10gen
Actually, MongoDB _does_ leave memory management to the kernel by using MMAP
to access data files. Most kernels will allocate a lot of memory to the disk
cache, which can make it look like mongo is eating all of your ram.

~~~
wanderr
This. It's one of the brilliant things about mongo. The downside is that after
a reboot it's up to you to get the OS to warm those caches back up.

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Bootvis
One tip for the overly enthusiastic (like me): Unfortunately Vagrant does not
work on Windows 7 64 bit (yet).

See: <https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/issue/194>

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wanderr
Our servers run CentOS. None of our developers would dream of running that as
a desktop OS. Some just use Ubuntu and call that good, but I like to have my
testing environment as identical to production as possible, so I took an
ancient laptop with a busted display and slapped CentOS on it. As I mentioned
in another comment, I set up samba so I can have apache pointing directly to
my project folder on my dev machine.

It makes for very convenient testing and it has helped me catch issues others
didn't see on their distros, mostly because CentOS has ancient versions of
everything and sometimes people don't realize they are relying on a feature
that was introduced later.

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codefisher
If your really serious about developing stuff what will end up running on a
Linux server, I think you should really be using Linux on the development
machine. I know that is not always practical, but more people should do it. No
one would dream of writing a Mac app on Windows, and I don't see why Linux
should be any different.

~~~
reynolds
If you're targeting a specific platform, it can make sense to use a virtual
machine instead of installing that platform on your development machine. As
far as code is concerned, it doesn't care that you're running it on a Linux VM
inside a Windows dev machine rather than directly on a Linux dev machine.

That being said, if you're trying to target Mac or Windows, it's generally a
good idea to use that specific platform's tools. It's reasonable to develop
Windows and Mac apps on Linux but it may not be the best environment to do so.
It's really up to you as a developer to determine the best toolchain and
processes based on what you're trying to accomplish.

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shuaib
Thanks for the great post. Came to know of vagrant for the first time reading
this, and have instantly fell in love.

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needyballsack
How do you handle version control in this environment? Locally on the mac or
in the virtual server?

~~~
garethr
Personally I edit the code on my mac using gvim and run and use git on the VM.
I've used ExpanDrive to mount the directory from the VM for editing previously
but I've been moving towards using vagrant with it's NFS shares.

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stretchwithme
I just touched Test and test on mac and I see both of them just fine.

~~~
daxelrod
On what filesystem?

Certainly not the default HFS+, which is is case-insensitive but case-
preserving.

~~~
stretchwithme
It works as you described on my macbook. I was on my Mac at work before.

