HyperV made a recent OneNote test very easy
I wrote the information below over the weekend, and realize today that it may only make sense if you know what virtualization is. We have a whole team blogging about it here, so you may want to browse over there if this doesn't make much sense.
Ever since getting my machine that is strong enough to run virtualized operating systems set up, I figured at some point I would see a payoff. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not obviously, but I knew that sooner or later the benefit would become apparent. Since last Friday, it did.
Until I had the machine set up (it took a while since I had a faulty hard drive), I had several test machines in my office. They were all hooked to one monitor, keyboard and mouse and I could jump between them with different shortcut keys. The imaging software was already installed, and I had different saved images of the hard drive with Windows XP, Window 2003 server, Vista, etc… saved. Switching operating systems required a boot to floppy (remember those?), an 8 minute wipe and restore of the driver and a reboot to re-create my domain account. All told, this was about a ten minute transition. Since I could always switch to another machine while any given one was being restored, I never lost those ten minutes. All told, not a bad system from my individual point of view.
I only saw about two disadvantages to this system. There was always the chance that as a machine was being restored, I would move to another machine and not return the machine being restored until hours later. When I got my tablet, it had no floppy drive, so I would have to go borrow a USB drive.
But from a bigger point of view, I had three or more machines always running and drawing power. I won't belabor the obvious advantage of having two less machines drawing electricity.
I had to set up a test that needed two machines to do some coauthoring. Normally, I would flip back and forth between two of the physical machines to set them up, then once restored, copy the same tools and logging files to each and then switch back and forth to verify the test was working as expected. With 2 instances of HyperV running Windows side by side on the same monitor, I could easily see when each machine was ready for the next step. Once I started the test, I could also observe the expected behavior on each machine. And there was even the minor benefit of using the host OS clipboard to save time (and error) typing the same path name on each machine in order to get to the network location for the test and logging information. There was also a tremendous sense of satisfaction from seeing two copies of OneNote interacting with each other via automation.
Oh, and then while I was watching the test run, I rebuilt our automation suite from the base OS hosting the two virtual machines running Windows. So much for "the greatest excuse for slacking off."
Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John