I would like to convert my entire development setup to a virtual box based environment.
Is there a minimal-OS which we can install on our laptop and run virtual box based windows XP or Vista or 7 or even linux on which we can do the development?
My problem is if I have a windows xp or 7 installed, then the amount of memory I can allocate to this virtual box runtime gets limited to around 50% of my available physical memory.
So ultimately I would like the resultant guest image to have the maximum RAM and the host can be a no-brainer OS.
I see some answers in stackoverflow which are quite old. But I believe there should be some updated latest versions in virtualbox which are probably worth knowing.
The answer to this depends on what sort of development you're talking about. If you're writing scripts or small applications then performance in a VM may be adequate. If you're building moderate or large C/C++ applications then the performance is likely to be horrendous. Any development activity that relies on a large amount of I/O such as C/C++ compilation will suffer in a VM. I believe that VMs can get quite decent CPU performance, so if your development activity is more CPU than disk bound then this might be workable. If you're only allocating 50% of your RAM to the VM then performance is going to be constrained even further.