Among other apps, I need to run Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008.  Using Bootcamp crossed my mind, but I didn’t like the the idea of rebooting into Windows every time I wanted to look at something dev-related.

So, I downloaded the trial of VMWare Fusion 2.05, installed a shiny new copy of Windows 7 Pro, installed VS2008 Pro, SQL2008, ReSharper, etc, and prepared to be amazed by my new efficient setup.

In short, it was pretty painful – everything just seemed to lag.  I was expecting it to be a bit slower than running natively, but after 20 minutes I realised it just wasn’t going to work.  I googled to see if this was a common experience, and came across this fairly comprehensive comparison between Fusion and Parallels which concludes “Parallels Desktop is the clear winner running 14-20% faster than VMware Fusion”.  That’s an impressive difference on any benchmark!

One very nice feature of both Fusion and Parallels is that you can import the competitor’s virtual image into the other.  So after reading this comparison, I figured I had nothing to lose – the next option was to just set up in Bootcamp which still wasn’t appealing.  I downloaded and installed Parallels 4, imported my Fusion virtual image, and 20 mins later I booted up the new Parallels image.

This was exactly what I was hoping for – the experience was vastly superior.  No obvious lag when opening/closing programs, responsive, didn’t slow down my other Mac programs at all, and just slicker.  Build times of existing VS projects may be a bit slower than running natively (understandable given only one cpu core is allocated to the virtual OS – I think), but overall it feels pretty snappy, and definitely not slow to the point I’d bother rebooting into Bootcamp.  It’s worth pointing out that I allocated 2gb memory (of 4gb total) to running each Fusion and Parallels – so they were on a fairly level playing field.

Parallels: 1 – Fusion: 0

Amazon CloudWatch – Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources, starting with Amazon EC2. It provides you with visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns—including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. To use Amazon CloudWatch, simply select the Amazon EC2 instances that you’d like to monitor; within minutes, Amazon CloudWatch will begin aggregating and storing monitoring data that can be accessed using web service APIs or Command Line Tools. See Amazon CloudWatch for more details.

Elastic Load Balancing – Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. Elastic Load Balancing detects unhealthy instances within a pool and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. You can enable Elastic Load Balancing within a single Availability Zone or across multiple zones for even more consistent application performance. Amazon CloudWatch can be used to capture a specific Elastic Load Balancer’s operational metrics, such as request count and request latency, at no additional cost beyond Elastic Load Balancing fees. See Elastic Load Balancing for more details.

Auto Scaling – Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and available at no additional charge beyond Amazon CloudWatch fees. See Auto Scaling for more details.

The last one is a particularly exciting feature. I talked about the promise of auto-provisioning a while ago and it’s exciting to see this taking shape.

In my opinion, Amazon continue to lead in this space, and I think they represent a challenge to enterprise IT organizations as to what level of sophistication is possible. Very few firms on the street have anything close to this level of capability, and it’s not because they don’t need it.

He’s right, isn’t he? Having the same company offer both virtualization and grid solutions is a truly virtuous pairing. First you tell people they need a grid solution to make a huge pool of computers look like a single one, then after it’s all set up you sell them virtualization software. It’s beautiful. It’s like if, for example, Nestle and Jenny Craig got together to simultaneously offer chocolate products and dieting solutions. Oh wait, they did: Nestle to buy Jenny Craig.
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