Visual Studio 2008/2010 on terminal server (IDE virtualization)

What is your opinion about using Visual Studio 2008/2010 with开发者_如何学Python all components (sql server, nant, nunit etc) by terminal server. I've got two options:

1. create separate virtual machines on hyper-v server (VS 2008/2010, windows7/sql server 2008/nan/nunit etc) for every user (hmm but there is a problem with application running as services, iis)

2. create only one virtual machine (Win server std 2008) with IDE and all necessary software

Every user will have domain account in both options. There are four software developers.

I am looking forward for all opinions.

never heard about using productive VS on a virtual server installation, but sounds interesting.

Assuming the machine has enough power I would prefer the second version, this should be less complicated, and there are just 4 developer...

we have been doing this for years. We have old Delphi6, ancient Borland C++ Builder 5, VS.NET 2003 (some legacy apps) VS2008 and now VS2010 running on a VMWare Virtual machine, both host OS and VMWare guest OS is Win2K8 Server.

It works excellent and allows us to save a lot of time with managing all 3rd party tools etc. And if we need to test some new components etc. we just quickly make a copy of the VMWare image and test on that.

Edit: We're running this on common hardware (pretty old too), Intel Xeon E3110 3.0 GHz dual-core (same as Core2duo), 8 GB RAM. Taking advantage of new hardware is as easy as moving the vmware image to a new stronger machine. Even the most productive DEV wouldn't be able to stress a new 6 core machine with SSD drive. With the shift to more processing cores instead of GHz this just gets better and better and allows us to utilize the hardware better. Not to mention all the time saved to keep libs and tools updated. We're 3-5 devs working on the server at any given time.

As someone who's been a sysadmin for over a dozen years, I would think that putting all these functions into one big server is going to be (a) costly and (b) slow. Thanks to Moore's Law, you can buy a desktop workstation for under $1000 today that has more computing power than many of the servers still in use. Programs like Visual Studio need a much larger bite of CPU and RAM than normal desktop productivity apps in order to run things like IntelliSense code completion gracefully. Thus, having a small server to host the database and build services plus individual workstations for each developer might be the best for performance and adaptability/upgrades.

That said, if you were to do this on one big server, I would suggest using HyperV (or VMware) with the following hosts:

• one instance for the SQL Server--all developers can share this
• one instance for the build server (Nant et al)--no need to duplicate this effort
• one instance for Terminal Services--each dev will have his own session, but you only need to configure the software in one place and it works for all 4
• leave some overhead in case you need to create a new virtual machine to test major upgrades, etc.