Visual Studio in Vbox

Hi folks,

I work with a couple of clients that require me to use different configurations of Visual Studio so I can keep their add-on products and environments straight. Up until now I have kept mobile racks and changed out hard drives and full OS installs to keep these separate but to consolidate my work I want to turn more to using Virtual machines to contain this stuff. My hope is that I can run with as little software installed on my host as possible and run VMs setup for different sets of tasks be it Graphics or what not.

I do have a concern though and wanted to hear a bit of feedback concerning Visual Studio. How much of a performance hit will doing so in a VM am I going to take? Are there any particular gotcha's I should be leery of?

Any input is greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Have you tried installing Visual Studio into Sandboxie? Im not exactly sure if that will do what your looking for, but I think it will. You can create multiple sandboxes and install Visual Studio into each one, configured how you want them. Its worth looking into. Other than that, you could also use ESXi on your systems and install multiple Virtual Machines, and switch between them as you want. Another option, if VS allows for it, is to have a couple different users with different VS configurations in each, depending on your clients needs. Take each client and make them a user on your system, then change the addons and configuration for Visual Studio in each user. I think that is doable, but I am not sure, I dont have much experience with VS.

I run vs2008 in vmware workstation

I didn't really notice any hit, but I am also on a pretty powerful box.
The only time I see a problem is when my machine is doing something like encoding or heavy disk io operations.
I would take your mobile racks and combine them into some sort of raid so you have a fast volume for the vm's.

Don't waste your time with sandboxie or thinapp or anything like that. Yea you can vs to open up and run...kinda
Vs just has too many tie ins to other parts of the os: .net iis sql etc. And it just becomes a pita
I would make a clean vm on vbox or virtualpc(I would choose vpc because with win7 you will be able to boot from vhd's) and vpc is great for windows vms.

I'm not sure on the licensing with this (may need to have different OS keys?), but you could create one "lightweight" VM with the necessary apps and VS, and then copy and paste that VHD and to create different VMs easily without reinstalling VS a bajillion times. Its a long install, and i can only imagine how much longer it is on a VM, not to mention multiple VMs.