Virtualization Update

Just a quick update.  After my previous post, I actually stopped using virtualization for most cases, since I found the performance hit to be too significant.  While the automation I mentioned before still doesn’t support HyperV, I hand built a couple of VM’s with it and I have to say that I’m quite impressed. 

On my host machine, it takes about 8 minutes to do a clean build of the code I usually work on.  With my previous virtual machine, it took about 32 minutes!  I think this happened because while my host machine has 4 processors, the VM can only access one of those.  I wasn’t willing to pay that price.  With HyperV today it takes about 9.5 minutes, and I am willing to pay that price for the added flexibility and the time I can save installing builds.