Blog de Joe Freeman

This article is not for you if you are happy developing/testing with at most two machines, your developer machine and a machine under test.  It is not for you if you do all your product evaluation, training and test can only be done in Azure or some other cloud environment that doesn't support nested virtualizaiton. This is really about building your own virtual labs or data centers to simulate larger installations or to use as training environments.  Microsoft applications or machine clusters often include Active Directory, a database and some application servers. You can some times install all this on single machines.  Multiple machines make sense if you are working on clustering or wish to leverage portions of your setup for future projects. Microsoft often provides VHDs for some of their more complicated products that save you configuration time. These machines are often more interesting when integrated into to some type of application including AD databases or...

My 5 machine Windows Server 2012 virtual lab was using 91GB of space on my Macbook after installing the OS and infrastructure components into the host and guest machines. I was able to reduce the actual disk space used on my MacBook SSD by 50% through Windows Server deduplication and virtual disk shrink operations. That results in  47GB  savings of physical disk space. Disk Drive Layout I have Windows Server Virtual Machine that runs Active Directory, DNS, Hyper-V and SQL Server Management Studio.  It also hosts 4 other guest machines whose disk drives are over provisioned for the actual drive allocated. We can do this because none of the guest machines use all their disk space and because. As an advanced topic, we can get additional savings with Disk Deduplication where windows can create only one copy of disk space that is identical across the guest VMs/VHDs located on the same server drive.  The same operating system files exist across all VMs so we can...

An integrated Microsoft environment provides a lot of standard infrastructure for your project.  It also requires a certain amount of standard infrastructure irrespective of the size of the project. Active Directory is the most obvious example of this   Developers that want to test out Microsoft tools or sub-systems almost always need a multi-system environment because most  Microsoft products work best when bound to Active Directory, a tool that needs to run on its own system.  Virtualization can help here making it easy to build virtual labs , "personal clouds" or use something like Azure. I've been working on a Microsoft project where all of our virtualization is done using Microsoft's Hyper-V.  This pushes me towards Hyper-V as my virtualization platform when sharing work with others on the team.  My most powerful laptop is my 16GB Quad-Core Macbook Pro.  Hyper-V doesn't run on OS/X so we can instead make use of a technique used by a lot of VMWar...