Re: Best Vista Setup for Development - Karl Peterson?

Karl Peterson had a lot of good advice last month concerning Virtual PC
(much of which is below), and now that I've finally got a Vista machine, I'm
fooling around with it. Fooling around is probably the best word here, as I
haven't gotten such good results yet, and I was hoping Karl and/or someone
else might help out a bit.

I've so far only installed a single Vista Home Premium Virtual Machine set
up, and it has resulted in a number of questions:

* I have a small builder edition of Vista Ultimate 32-bit, included with my
new PC. Can I install the virtual machines, temporarily, as any other
version? I have to say on the license agreement that I have that version,
even though I don't, so didn't know. This is just for testing, of course.

* Are Virtual Drives /necessary/ with the Virtual PC? Reason I ask is that
it seems that VPC makes its own "system drive", without adding anything
else. But I'm not sure.

* Size is a problem; my Vista install is (so far) over 10 GB in size. Yours
was 2.3 GB (the zip at least). How do I get the size smaller? I have the
Coding Horror article, but it's about installing WinXP, and I wasn't sure
how to do it with Vista. Especially since a lot of programs and utilities
don't work with Vista.

* I /thought/ I'd have to "save" my virtual PC to keep the changes I made
during a session, but that appears to be automatic? That being the case, I
guess I need to /save/ it with another name, or location (or to DVD) when
it's the way I want, before testing, so as to start with a virgin test
setup?

* I made two accounts, an Admin account with admin privileges, and a Testing
account with standard user privileges. I want to test my installs as a
normal user, but will need admin to do checks and make changes. Does that
sound right?

* How does the 30 day expiration date of a trial install work out here? If
it uses the install date, won't installing a 31 day old copy from a DVD end
up being out of date, and therefore unusable? This part is really confusing
to me (like the rest isn't). ;-)

* You/Karl mention about shrinking down the VHD as small as possible, before
burning. How is that done?

I'm afraid I'll have more questions after I get further along, but I'm
finding this really interesting and want to install virtual environments of
all of the OS's for testing. I have full versions, not currently used, of
XP, 2000, ME, 98 and probably even 95 laying around somewhere. ;-)

--
Regards,

Rick Raisley

"Karl E. Peterson" <karl@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%235zlPoDXHHA.528@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Rick Raisley <rraisley-A-T-harscotrack-D-O-T-com> wrote:
"Karl E. Peterson" <karl@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:%

It's fun. Took a couple tries to get down how I wanted to do it, but
yeah, it's
definitely fun. I filled one DVD with VMs of permutations of
95/98/2K/XP,
clean/withVB5-6/withOffice2000-2003. I can whip any of them out, and
have 'em
running in minutes now. It's definitely an "art" getting the VHD
(virtual hard
drive) file whittled down to the minimum size necessary, for archiving,
though.
To give you an idea...

DVDs? I thought these would be in partitions, or directories, on the
hard
drive, no? They don't /run/ off the DVD, do they? Or are the DVDs just
so
you can put one in place quickly on your hard drive, without taking
space up
all the time.

Yeah, the latter. VPC creates what it calls a "virtual hard drive" as a
single VHD
file. These are, by default, dynamically sized, so they start out small
and grow
and grow and grow and grow... When I get a VM setup the way I want to
preserve it,
I attempt to shrink down the VHD file as small as possible, then burn to
DVD so I
can instantly restore an entire operating system! Very slick. But to
give you an
idea of the storage sizes you're looking at (or aiming for <g>), here are
a few I
have online at the moment:

02/09/2007 05:10 PM 55,417,150 Win98-IE4.cab
02/09/2007 05:13 PM 120,601,116 Win98-IE6.cab
02/23/2007 05:58 PM 130,423,492 W95.cab
02/09/2007 05:28 PM 160,569,346 Win98-IE6-VB.cab
02/09/2007 05:21 PM 178,678,986 Win98-IE6-O2K.cab
02/13/2007 11:18 AM 183,245,352 XP-Pro (stripped).cab
02/13/2007 01:54 PM 198,542,446 XP-Bare.cab
02/09/2007 05:53 PM 216,374,452 Win98-IE6-VB-O2K.cab
02/09/2007 06:52 PM 297,034,590 Win2K-SP0.cab
02/13/2007 05:06 PM 300,436,094 XPP2.cab
02/09/2007 07:05 PM 323,784,796 Win2K-SP4.cab
02/23/2007 11:02 AM 371,535,154 XPP2-VB.cab
02/09/2007 07:22 PM 382,041,220 Win2K-SP4-IE6.cab
02/09/2007 07:59 PM 417,612,140 Win2K-SP4-IE6-VB.cab
02/09/2007 07:40 PM 422,082,082 Win2K-SP4-IE6-O2K.cab
02/23/2007 12:16 PM 441,530,936 XPP2-VB-O2K.cab
02/12/2007 11:10 AM 459,783,776 Win2K-SP4-IE6-VB-O2K.cab
02/23/2007 02:06 PM 768,065,402 XPP2-VB-O2K3.cab
02/28/2007 06:15 PM 2,349,559,142 Vista.zip

Which causes me to wonder how I messed up the W95 such that is *so* much
bigger than
the W98! I found cabarc.exe did a better compression job than winzip, in
general,
but that it can't handle files much bigger than 2Gb very gracefully. Had
to switch
over to winzip for Vista! Here's an example of some XP builds:

02/28/2007 05:49 PM 784,659,968 XP-Bare.vhd
02/28/2007 05:49 PM 13,082 XP-Bare.vmc
02/23/2007 11:50 AM 1,409,698,304 XPP2-VB-O2K.vhd
02/23/2007 11:20 AM 12,178 XPP2-VB-O2K.vmc
02/23/2007 03:46 PM 1,860,696,064 XPP2-VB-O2K3.vhd
02/23/2007 03:46 PM 12,342 XPP2-VB-O2K3.vmc
02/23/2007 10:26 AM 1,264,959,488 XPP2-VB.vhd
02/23/2007 10:14 AM 12,162 XPP2-VB.vmc
02/13/2007 05:45 PM 1,061,486,080 XPP2.vhd
02/13/2007 05:40 PM 12,130 XPP2.vmc

The VMC file is an XML "virtual machine configuration" file, and can be
hand editted
to point to different locations for the VHD. (This relation will make
more sense
after you've built your first VM.)

--
.NET: It's About Trust!
http://vfred.mvps.org




.

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