Dmitri on Virtualization

I finally managed to run my Subversion Virtual Appliance off the flash drive. It took a lot of trying and learning. The bottom line is it runs! and runs better then I dared to expect.

I use 4GB Kingston USB 2.0 jump drive. Performance was a biggest challenge to overcome. With trials and errors I settled down to using a single large .vmdk and formatting USB drive to NTFS, and performance boosted.

Now it works like this. I insert USB key. Few seconds - removable storage got connected.  Launch VMWare - another 5 seconds. The Subversion VM is kept suspended on the flash drive. Resume! - takes 15 seconds to bring it back up. At this point it is fully functional.

Rebooting VM is slightly slower,

Testing CheckOut: I  and got all 80 files (55Mb) to a new folder in 10 sec, exactly as when VM was running of the laptop harddrive.

The pay-off for NTFS is that now it takes time for the file system to commit the changes. So I need to wait for about a minute before the system allows me to “safely remove” the flash.  But I don’t mind.

The way it works now is absolutely exciting My source control appliance lives in my pocket, doesn’t pollute the system, run off any other computer, and easy to back up.

I love my Virtual Subversion. Except the hard drive size. 120G is ridiculously large for a virtual machine. Especially when I broke it by 2G peaces to run it off a flash-drive: I just couldn’t stand looking at these 60 .vmdk files!And I don’t think my repo would ever take 120G. If you think you would, check this out.

So I decided to resize the Virtual Hard drive to make it smaller, say 10 Gb instead of 120Gb. Resizing the drive is easy, as long as you expand it. But shrinking the virtual hard disk is as hard as then shrinking a physical one. Vmware-vdiskmanager can only expand. And don’t confuse –k option: it does shrinks the vmdk file, but doesn’t alter the Hard Disk size.
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Virtual appliance idea is lovely.

You are a .NET developer, starting a small software project. It comes along, and you feel it is time for source control. You want to use Subversion because friends say it is cool and fancy. But installing and configuring subversion is a mess and a pain. You are reluctant, if you never did it. And intimidated, if you have already tried.

The answer is Virtual Appliances. Look how lovely:

I download a virtual appliance with subversion installed and preconfigured. Power up a Virtual machine; with couple of touches my subversion server is up and running. No mess on my laptop. No dusty ubuntu box in the corner. No installing Apache, no configuring subversion. All is prepared and packaged professionally. I bring up the VM when you need it, and where you need it. In the morning, check out, in the evening, check in. The rest of the day it can sleep as a file on my pocket USB hard drive. As the team grows we will run it 24/7 on the network server. Sounds ideal for a small mobile team.

Reality check.

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