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asp.netvisual-studio-2008vmwareramdisk

Running Visual Studio and sites inside a VMware RAM Disk

I have a machine with 24 GB so I was planning to install Vista 64-bit and nothing on it but VMware workstation 6.5 Vista Image, that will be installed on a RAM Disk that I will make on the main Vista.

The whole VMware Image will be in RAM, so I will install Visual Studio 2008 in it and put all my sites there as if it was a real disk. I have done a few tests of running applications from RAM Disk and the performance was blazing, but I have some concerns.

  • How can I make continuous backups? Since it’s a RAM disk, once the PC is restarted, everything will be gone: Visual Studio, SQL databases, my sites, and everything else.

  • As long as my main host Vista doesn’t have anything installed, is leaving 8 GB of RAM for it is enough?

  • The VMware Image is one file, so should I defrag the host drive or the drive inside the VMware image?

Solution

  • Defragmentation: Here's what VMWare recommends: "first, run a defragmentation utility in the VM; second, use the WMware Workstation defragmentation tool; third, run a defragmentation utility on the host"

    Backup: for my VMs, I use SynbackPro to run a timed backup of my project files to a SHARED folder on my host machine, then on the host I have SyncbackPro running a timed backup to an external drive. That way, no matter which VM I happen to be using, the external drive gets the backups.