Improvements for Vista with Virtualization
March 11th, 2007I have yet to take the full plunge into Vista but I have had a copy running inside of a Virtual PC which I turn on occasionally just to see how it performs after I get fresh updates. Since the beginning the performance under virtualization has been painfully sluggish. A couple of recent changes have provided the much needed speed improvements.
The first change was the release of Virtual PC 2007. I have been running Virtual Server R2 which works fine for hosting my WinXP and Windows Server 2003 instances. I prefer to run Virtual PC now because it does not require logging into the instance via Remote Desktop which causes problems, such as the issues I have had with the clipboard. I have noticed some performance benefits of using Virtual PC over Virtual Server. I also became more interested in a setting for hardware enabled virtualization.
Last week I read a very useful post about virtualization which explained that hardware enabled virtualization can be turned on in the BIOS for most modern computers. (see Virtual PC Tips and Hardware Assisted Virtualization) I rebooted my computer and changed this setting in the BIOS and suddenly Virtual PC has the support I wanted. Now when I use Vista under Virtual PC the performance is quite good.
The other stumbling block I have had over Vista is the problems running Visual Studio 2005. There was a Service Pack released for Visual Studio but it did not address all of the issues for Vista. But now you can get the Visual Studio update for Vista.
I still plan to keep running the version of Windows which came with my Dell laptop but I will soon be preparing to run Visual Studio on Vista with Virtual PC. And it has some compelling reasons to make the move. My primary interest is to use IIS7 which has many great features which allow it to integrate directly with the .NET runtime. It also allows me to run multiple local websites, unlike IIS5 on WinXP which limits you to a single website. When moving into doing more SOA work with WS-* and WCF it is becoming increasingly important to simulate the multiple services with distinct endpoints.
