setting up a server side environment..

techguy

Hi Guys,

I am planning on getting into some server side programming. One of the main things that has been stopping me is setting up the servers.. I dont want to install the servers onto my everyday pc because it will just clog it up..

I was thinking of putting using a virtual pc running server 2003. I can install all the services I want on that and then just run that virtual computer whenever i'm feeling creative..

Won't this be the same as connecting to another computer on the network? Any pitfalls? My system is well specced so will run it just fine.

Are virtual pcs hard to set up.. Im thinking of VMware..what version should I get?

Thanks.

Ginger

THey are as easy .. if you can set up a new machine you can set up a vm

Just download VPC 2007 and create a new machine.. install OS as required and then install VPC additions.

Install whatever you need..

Other than that, what server side tech are you going to be running. A VM takes up more space etc than running it locally.. but it is better to do it in a vm if you are targetting a particular server os

techguy

I've just downloaded VPC2007 and I can see this being really useful to me..

I will be installing SQL server for a start. I will also tinker with apache and different flavours of linux on it also..

I might also try out vista on it to see wht all the fuss is about..

Thanks for the help.

matrim

VPC 2007 has problems with some linux versions, although it works very well with Windows.

When I was trying to get Ubuntu to work in a virtual machine, I ended up using VirtualBox.

stevenmu

I don't think you'll get Vista's Aero Glass in a VM, and vista seems to be much harder on disk usage than XP which doesn't bode great for VM use (that said I haven't tried it myself so it could be fantastic and smooth).


Also while VMs are great for many things if you're just worried about setting up a web server on your local machine Visual Studio (and the free Visual Web Developer) include a built-in web server that's very handy and only runs while you're using it. i.e. when you hit the run button it launches the web server and opens IE and points it to it, when you leave Visual Studio the web server closes too. Very handy for quicly developing/debugging. Only much use for ASP.Net though.

techguy

cool, not going to touch vista cause it just irritates me at this stage.

I've been trying to get virtual pc to start my VM in a window bu it keeps starting in full screen and upsetting the host machine resolution..

Has anybody has this problem??

Martyr

if you'll use windows, have you looked at xamp?

• Apache 2.2.9
• MySQL 5.0.51b
• PHP 5.2.6 + PHP 4.4.9 + PEAR
• PHP-Switch win32 1.0 (please use the "php-switch.bat")
• XAMPP Control Version 2.5 from www.nat32.com
• XAMPP Security 1.0
• SQLite 2.8.15
• OpenSSL 0.9.8h
• phpMyAdmin 2.11.7
• ADOdb 4.98
• Mercury Mail Transport System v4.52
• FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.25
• Webalizer 2.01-10
• Zend Optimizer 3.3.0
• eAccelerator 0.9.5.3 for PHP 5.2.6 (comment out in the php.ini)

i'm using a portable version of this with notepad++ to learn PHP.
but if you plan to learn windows oriented language like asp.net you'll probably want vstudio.

theres list of WAMPS (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) for comparison here