When you install Delphi 2010, put it in a virtual machine

I recently compared the performance of virtual machines with the real hardware. The figures were suprisingly good.

Shortly after that, disaster struck. My laptop wouldn't turn on. It took Dell 2 weeks to fix, replacing the motherboard and the video card.

If I had delphi installed directly, I would have had 2 weeks of very limited productivity. As it was, I ripped the hard drive out, stuck it in a usb caddy and continued working on another machine. I was back up to speed the next day.
Edit: It didn't take a full day to get productive again, I did other work until it became apparent that it would be a while before my computer was fixed. It only took about 30 minutes to transfer the data over and get going.

If it had been a hard drive problem, I would have restored the latest vm backup off a dvd, pulled the latest changes from the version control or the source backup and been back up to speed with limited data loss.

I get a new laptop next month. Installing delphi is going to be as easy as installing vmware and copying the vm files over. 30 minutes work, most of which is surfing the internet waiting for the files to copy. The last time I actually had to install Delphi, it took hours.

There are other advantages as well, my development backups fit on a single dual layer dvd, I get to run and test on multiple OSs and disaster recovery plan is much shorter.

So make Delphi 2010 your starting point. Download Virtual Box, VMWare Workstation ($$$) or Virtual PC and use that for development. If you are running Windows 7, you could look into Windows XP Mode and use that.

Windows Performance Index - VMware workstation v Virtual Box

Virtual Box 3 has been released. I haven't used previous versions of VB, but it has a good rep. Version 3 now supports 3d acceleration. I have been wanting to use Aero and Glass in my virtual machines so that I could develop Vista specific applications so I gave it a try.

First the bad news, VB doesn't support enough 3d features to run Aero (neither does VMware). I did discover a work around though, connect to your virtual machine using Remote Desktop Connection from a Vista machine, turn all graphics options to high and volia.

While I had VB installed, I did a quick and dirty comparision with VMware workstation using Windows Performance Index. Take these results with a grain of salt, I didn't spend much time playing with the setup and tweaking. I couldn't get dual core to work on VB, it just blue-screened, and I didn't have the time to spend sorting it out.

Windows Performance Index

	Host	VMware Single proc	VMware Dual proc	Virtual Box Single Proc
Processor	5.4	4.4	5.2	4.4
Memory	5.1	4.9	5.2	5.9
Primary Hard disk	5.4	5.3	5.4	4.7

The memory figures are surprising, I am not sure if the VB figures of 5.9 are real or just a sign of something wrong somewhere. Draw your own conclusions on that.

VB is slower in hard drive, but otherwise up with the play processor wise. Getting dual core working would probably give similar processor figures to VMware dual core.

I was impressed with how well VMware matches up to the host system. While VB doesn't seem to be quite there yet, it is still doing pretty well, and you can't beat the price.