Creating a Development Environment using Virtual PC – First Time Running the Image

Yesterday, I walked thorugh setting up an OS on a Virtual Machine.  Today, we’re going to go over giving your image some substance as well as performance tuning it.  

Running your Virtual Image for the First Time

Running your new image for the first time will require several additional steps to complete the setup process.

First, check your internet connectivity by browsing to your favorite search engine.  If it doesn’t connect, you’ll need to modify the settings to use Shared Networking (NAT).  This can be done through the VPC interface by selecting your Virtual Machine, clicking Settings, then selecting Networking.

Second, install the Virtual Machine Add-Ons.  Select Install or Update Virtual Machine Addons under the Actions menu.  This will install the VMC Addons, which will greatly improve performance and add some nice touches.  

Further optimizations can be accomplished by following the steps outlined at Andrew Connell’s Site. While these steps are laid out for Windows XP, you can find almost all of the items mentioned with minimal digging in Vista.

Next, install any critical OS updates.  These might be downloading automatically in the background through Windows Update.  However, you may need to verify your copy of Windows is genuine first.

Vista does not install IIS by default, so you will need to set it up.  Follow the steps at Chris Fulstow’s blog to install IIS and configure ASP.NET to run on Vista.

Install VS 2008 or Visual Web Developer onto the image.

Install Office 2007 and any other software you want on the image.

Finally, install service pack 1 for both Visual Studio & .NET 3.5 framework.

Disk Cleanup

Cleaning up your disk will save some space when we compact it. The following are some locations that can have files removed.

• Run Disk cleanup on the C: drive
• Delete any photos, music, video files that may have been installed to your documents folder, including shared documents
• Remove games and any other non-critical OS components you will not need
• Clean out temp folders

Defragment the Disk

Use the Windows defrag utility to defragment the virtual hard disk. This can take over an hour so you don’t need to be constantly monitoring the process.

DisKeeper makes a great tool for defrargging disks. I’ve used it for a few years and highly recommend it.

PreCompact & Compacting the Disk

Merrick Chaffer has an excellent blog post detailing some ways to improve VPC performance.  We’re specifically interested in the Running Precomact and Compacting the .vhd file sections.

Final Steps for the Main Image

Mark the XXX_Base.vhd hard disk image Read-Only. This will prevent any accidental changes to the image. Once we create differencing disks based on this image, any changes to our base image will render our new child images useless. 

Wrap-up

Tomorrow we’ll get into creating differencing disks, installing Azure, and finalizing our development environment.