How do you organize VMware Workstation images? [closed]

Answer 1

You can have a quick browse at virt-manager, just as an aside as to whats also there.. you never know, you might even like it..I think having such a tool can give you a bigger kick in performance and less disk defrag issues.

You would have to go for a steep learning curve and the conversion time to make it all work perhaps.

If updates is your main time spender, try WSUS, nothing related to VMs itself, but it helps with deploying windows updates.

Lastly, check Hanselman's blog on Invirtus, Virtual Machine Optimization at its best.

Answer 2

I'd stick with your current system. In this situation, having isolated images gives you a lot more flexibility. It might cost you some more time doing updates and installs, but it will be worth it. And that's mostly stuff that you can have going in the background while you do other things, so if you manage your time well the time spent on that should be negligible.

Also, it's probably a good idea to keep your images on their own disk or at least on their own partition. If you do that it shouldn't have any effect on fragmentation on the rest of your system.

Answer 3

This is really going to depend on what kind of and how many projects and clients you have. Building a new VM for every client doesn't scale well if you have dozens of clients, since you'll have to be keeping them all up to date.

I'd be wary of keeping files spread between the host and VMs as you mention though. It's better to keep all your dependencies in one place.

I'm interested to see others' VM strategies here too.

Answer 4

I work for CohesiveFT, the guys who make the Elastic Server platform - so I am biased - but we use the platform to deliver projects to partners and customers. It allows us to set up assembly-time components for different projects and then build them into VMs on the fly for VMware, Parallels, Xen and EC2. The service has a tagging feature so you can tag software packages, server specifications and templates and keep your assets straight.

You can also create assembly portals (think a content management system for assembling virtual servers) which you can control or even let customers have access to customizing their own virtual servers.

http://www.elasticserver.com