Remote Development
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
That sounds like a woeful idea. X| Have you told them you'll need full admin rights to the servers concerned yet (If that doesn't scare them off, nothing will)?
Anna :rose: Linting the day away :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "If mushy peas are the food of the devil, the stotty cake is the frisbee of God"
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
If you're doing anything graphical, the bandwidth of your network will really struggle to keep up. If the network goes down, then you're stuck staring at a blank screen, rather than just inconvenienced that you can't check in for a while [edit] If your build times are too slow, I can highly recommend Incredibuild[^] [/edit]
Last modified: 16mins after originally posted --
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
Well you better have a Google-type network and quantum servers. If you don't then you will be better of running Visual Studio on your Cell Phone.
Brad Australian - Captain See Sharp on "Religion" any half intelligent person can come to the conclusion that pink unicorns do not exist.
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
Well you better have a Google-type network and quantum servers. If you don't then you will be better of running Visual Studio on your Cell Phone.
Brad Australian - Christian Graus on "Best books for VBscript" A big thick one, so you can whack yourself on the head with it.
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
Well, if they're willing to fit 2 processors and 2GB of memory per developer... (I'd recommend 8 x Xeon 5100 or 4 x Xeon 5300s). No. Lame idea. Visual Studio is one of the most heavy-weight programs out there. My view is that you need short develop/build/test cycles and you aren't going to get that from a shared box. Also, they're not going to like the instability resulting from all of you running your debug code on this shared server! I believe Visual Studio licences are per-user so they'd need to buy 12 licences anyway, even if they only installed on a single server. Instead if they're worried about cost you should consider volume licensing.
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
I'd stay far away from terminal server for development purposes. Developers required admin rights and use loads of resources on the machines they work on. Both of these things are valid points not to use terminal server, as in almost all cases the sysadmin won't give you admin rights and the servers simply don't have enough power to serve everybody in the development team. An upgrade is a lot cheaper in my opinion and gives better results.
WM. What about weapons of mass-construction? "What? Its an Apple MacBook Pro. They are sexy!" - Paul Watson
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
I don't have experience because my code monkey sense gets all dizzy and throwing up. You can kill that it It doesn't make sense from the $$$ department. It looks like a dream project of toying with the greatest server of mankind, an shunning the beast they know (herding 12 individual PCs) for the beast they don't know (herding 20 Visual Studios running on one Server). (1) Visual Studio 2005 is the most CPU and Memory hungry application I know. For decent work, you need a late core and 1G memory. Once per client. (As I tested recently, disk speed helps VC6 a good deal, but VS2005 simply shrugs it off. Overclocking RAM or CPU seems to helps, though) (2) Build cycles can become very frequent, and they add up, making the developer idle (or turn to The Onion) (3) Downtime cost.
$(cost of developer) * downtime * NumberOfDevelopersvs.$(cost of developer) * downtimeAnd this doesn't include administrative cost. (4) As someone else stated, I don't think you can share Visual Studio Licences. (5) Multiple instances. I frequently run with two Visual Studios open. A suitable dev machine (2GB, dual core, fast disk) can be had for €600 and requires minimum external administration. Together with one of the "Build Distribution" addins you get solid performance at I think much lower TCO.
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Velopers, Develprs, Developers!
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
Tell them you'd prefer SSH and VI :)
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Shog9 wrote:
And with that, Paul closed his browser, sipped his herbal tea, fixed the flower in his hair, and smiled brightly at the multitude of cute, furry animals flocking around the grassy hillside where he sat coding Ruby on his Mac...
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
It could possibly work if the were going to use virtual machines rather than terminal services. But then you'd still have a whole boat load of disadvantages over individual hardware. I can't see the needed server hardware being cheaper than the workstations either as the servers will need loads of large ram sticks and lots of cpu's with lots of cores. From a quick look on the UK Dell site you' be looking at £10k a server and you'd need 2, thats to give each dev 1gig ram and 1 cpu core and leave the host operating system 2 cores and 2 gig. You could build a whole load of nice workstations for £1k a piece which would come in way cheaper.
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
Why fewer Visual Studio licenses??? That sounds like bs to me.... As other people have said - the server specs need to give the equivalent of an appropriate developer spec machine **per developer on the server** - I'd want 2+GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, plus a fast hard drive. Also, you need a good size monitor (20" TFT minimum) - hows the network going to handle that sort of video updating? In the end, developer spec machines are actually probably much cheaper than getting server grade hardware...
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
Graham J Newton wrote:
Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment?
Yes. We have one set up just to debug Citrix-specific issues. It works well enough, for that. I'd sooner chew my arm off than use it for day-to-day development.
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
Does sound like an appalling idea, the best thing for you to do might be to ask them to find one other shop doing the same thing and get their experiences. The only possible rationale for fewer licenses is if you have developers that don't all work at the same time normally. If they all come in 9-5 every work day and work in vs then there is no license saving at all unless they plan on pirating them. You're far better off with getting some new work stations. Terminal services is not intended for power users like developers, it's intended for things like banks where every workstation runs the same banking software or insurance companies or etc etc (you get the idea).
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I don't have experience because my code monkey sense gets all dizzy and throwing up. You can kill that it It doesn't make sense from the $$$ department. It looks like a dream project of toying with the greatest server of mankind, an shunning the beast they know (herding 12 individual PCs) for the beast they don't know (herding 20 Visual Studios running on one Server). (1) Visual Studio 2005 is the most CPU and Memory hungry application I know. For decent work, you need a late core and 1G memory. Once per client. (As I tested recently, disk speed helps VC6 a good deal, but VS2005 simply shrugs it off. Overclocking RAM or CPU seems to helps, though) (2) Build cycles can become very frequent, and they add up, making the developer idle (or turn to The Onion) (3) Downtime cost.
$(cost of developer) * downtime * NumberOfDevelopersvs.$(cost of developer) * downtimeAnd this doesn't include administrative cost. (4) As someone else stated, I don't think you can share Visual Studio Licences. (5) Multiple instances. I frequently run with two Visual Studios open. A suitable dev machine (2GB, dual core, fast disk) can be had for €600 and requires minimum external administration. Together with one of the "Build Distribution" addins you get solid performance at I think much lower TCO.
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Velopers, Develprs, Developers!
We are a big screwed up dysfunctional psychotic happy family - some more screwed up, others more happy, but everybody's psychotic joint venture definition of CP
Linkify!|Fold With Us!peterchen wrote:
Visual Studio 2005 is the most CPU and Memory hungry application I know.
VS2005 is like Notepad compared to Lotus Notes. 50 of these single chip can sport 80 cores[^] should be the min requirements for Notes.
I'd love to help, but unfortunatley I have prior commitments monitoring the length of my grass. :Andrew Bleakley:
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I've been making some noise about the PCs we have in our company to develop on. They're woefully under-spec. In response, our IT people have mooted the idea of moving us to central servers and using Terminal Services (I think). They say we'll need fewer Visual Studio licenses, the servers will be high-spec so it will be faster for us and everyone wins. My gut instinct is that it's an appalling idea, but I can't come up with many rational reasons why. There are about a dozen of us in the Development department. Has anyone out there got any experience of this sort of environment? Does it work well? Graham UK
its going to go like "rear end cow ejection material"......... I've seen seen a fast terminal server session. The clue is in the name "terminal" ie dead!!!!!!! I suspect your dev dept will start losing people.
Grady Booch: I told Google to their face...what you need is some serious adult supervision. (2007 Turing lecture) http:\\www.frankkerrigan.com