I am anticipating multiple projects in Linux in the near future. I believe I am going buy a new, fast development laptop and was thinking about running Linux natively on the box for speed reasons (I usually run Linux in a VM on a Windows box).
However, I have been juggling with the idea of continuing to work with Linux in virtual environments, one VM per project. It seems to have the upside of environment isolation as well as strong portability. The downsides seem to be speed (since I am not running the OS natively) and isolation of some resources I would like to be common (let’s say Pidgin, where I want to access common logs or something).
Are people doing this? What else is there to consider? Any insight would be great. Thanks.
Going with Preet’s answer: As I always say….. unless you have a issue – don’t optimise, and then first throw more hardware at it….In other words – why not try it. A linux host is likely to be very fast host for virtual machines. – Preet Sangha