Title: I've been thinking about how much VM's have changed the way I work now, esp. how I setup my dev environment and the kind of hardware I run.<p>A few years back I switched to running my VisualStudio Windows install on a VM;I originally started on Parallels then switched to VMWare, and then recently switched back to Parallels (it just runs Win7 way way faster on my rig at least). I love the ease of moving to a new machine (just copy the vm), or even backing up my windows dev environment (just copy the 45gig file to my Synology NAS). It's also nice if you need to temporarily move your Dev environment to another machine (again, just dump the vm onto an external drive and you can even run it off that if you need too).<p>I was wondering how prevalent using VM's in this manner is. I seem to run into a lot of developers that think running a VM is much slower than an actual machine, and I guess it depends on your rig.  I run a original Mac Pro tower with dual 2.6 core 2 duo procs + 12 gigs of ram; I can give Win7 4gigs of ram and allocate one of my cores to it and with that setup, Win7 + VS2008 smokes. It's honestly the fasest 'Windows machine' I've ever worked on. An added bonus to running like this is my email, music, IM and torrent clients are all running on the host so when Windows needs to reboot, I can keep working on some emails or updating my project plan, make a skype call, etc.<p>So how about it guys, do others run a VM type rig now or is it still predominantly just running a dedicated box for your main dev env?
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