I’ve come across this post from MVP Reza Alirezaei’s blog. In his post he lays out how you can build a VHD and basically boot to it natively. Gone are the days of partitioning a hard disk for multiple windows installs. Instead you can now go off, build your VM, Sysprep it, run a few commands and boot to it on start-up.

There’s good points and bad points about this. First off, Reza makes a very good point about the upcoming Visual Studio 2010, namely:

VS 2010 Beta 1 runs much faster in a native boot from vhd than a VM. It’s partly due to VS 2010 being heavily based on WPF and emulating the graphics card in VMs forces WPF to run into software rendering mode and kills the performance big time. So far, every time I’ve fired up VS 2010 in a VM its taken 5 mins to get frustrated with the performance and give up! Obviously VS 2010 is still in beta and lots of improvements will be made in future , but in the interim, native boot from vhd is pretty much the only way that allows me to evaluate VS 2010 dev experience without having WPF running into software rendering mode, frequent crashes and performance headaches.

I’ve tried running VS2010 beta in a VMWare (Server) machine running Windows Server 2k8 and it’s truly abysmal. CPU usage jumped to 100% so frequently it was unusable. I am really starting to think that it might be a problem for us to have a VM with VS2010 and SQL Server 2008 running on it, never mind SP2010 when it arrives.  By the way the host machine I tried this on was running 3gb with Windows 7 and it’s pretty well specced too.

Ultimately it doesn’t bode well for SharePoint 2010 seeing as SharePoint Foundation (formerly WSS)  states that 2-4gb is required and SharePoint Server (MOSS) needs 6-8 GB ram!

Is it then time to look at a paradigm shift for development in that we have a number of development VHD’s that we boot natively from, and from within them we virtualise our common applications, such as email, word etc? It might even be reasonably straightforward as new Online versions of the Office Suite could be used.

Obviously there’s good and bad points about this.

• Overall performance will be better as the Development VM’s will utilise the machines hardware directly. VS2010 might even load before lunchtime.
• You might need to reboot to switch between VM’s, but this is no different from shutting down 1 VM to start another. Might even be faster than VMWare shutting down.

I hope to play about with the native boot stuff over the next few days. Stay tuned for feedback.

[Update] Apparently you need Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate to enable Virtual HD booting