I bought a new laptop (DELL Precision M6500) a while ago. My idea was to run much of my work in virtual machines and just keep the parts that I use the most in the main operating system. So this is my story of setting this new machine up.

Setting Up the Host and Main OS

I installed Windows 7 64-bit with Forefront anti-virus and of course hooked it up with my Home Server for backups. I choose both Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010, but SQL Server 2008 (not R2) for my main OS. Additionally I installed TweetDeck for twitter, Live Writer for blogging, Spotify for music and iTunes is required since I have iPhone.

Getting the Old Machine Running on the New Machine

To enable a fast switch, my idea was to create a virtual machine of my old one. I downloaded Disk2vhd from sysinternals.com which can take a snapshot of the disc even when it’s running. The process to create the file took a couple of hours, but when it was on the external hard drive it was easy to copy to my new machine. In the meanwhile I downloaded Windows Virtual PC. Booting up the old PC in Virtual PC was a big disappointment, because it can not handle 64-bit versions of OS and even my old PC was running Vista 64-bit. This is a big limitation in Virtual PC that I can’t understand, it could at least be available in Ultimate version of Windows?

The next thing to try was downloading WMware Player (also free) which has support for 64-bit guest OS. I spent several days trying to get my image up and running in WMware Player, but it always ended with a blue screen of death before login screen should have shown up. It didn’t help to run repairs from the setup or anything.

After a tip from a colleague I installed Virtual Box instead, which is open source and also free. My image booted immediately in Virtual Box, but I got problems with 100% CPU utilization. Trying different things with great support on the Virtual Box forums, finally got it working. Its not perfect, but I can boot it up and do some work in it, even if it still easily get high CPU utilizations. The settings that got it going was that I turned down from 2 CPU cores to just 1 and I set the RAM to something just below 4GB. With any of these parameters higher blocks the CPU completely.

Creating More Virtual Machines

After getting my new machine working, it was time to fulfill my plans on making virtual machines for different things. First thing to do was of course to set up a new Windows 7 guest, with all current Windows Updates and making sure it is activated. I also needed to spend some time to get the networking working as I wanted. I ended up with a single network card running NAT, but it required me to configure my host machine name in the hosts file and setting the DNS servers hard. With that completed I saved a copy of my clean OS installation to make it easy to set up as many of them as I need.
Next step I choose to install only the client tools for SQL Server 2008 SP1, because I believe that it wont be necessary to have running databases more than on the host. Saving a new copy of the disk and then continuing with Office 2003 (just Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word), SP2 and then a last copy of the disk. Note that there is no CPU utilizations problems with Virtual Box on this freshly installed machines.
Now I have started to make a Visual Studio 2008 machine, and later on I will continue with a Visual Studio 2005 (need that for some WSE3 stuff that isn’t upgraded yet). A Windows Server 2008 with Sharepoint for development is also on the list.

Have you done anything similar and want to share your ideas or what have worked for you?