Working with Virtual Hard Disks in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2

  • June 20, 2010
  • James Skemp
A new feature in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is the ability to work with Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) directly within the OS, by booting from them or mounting them as additional drives. While I've had a good deal of experience with using VHDs in virtual environments, being able to work with VHDs directly is fairly new, and leaves some question as to how useful it could potentially be, since I'm happy using VirtualBox to work with virtual machines when I need to do any testing.

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Installing CollabNet Subversion Server 1.6.3 and TortoiseSVN 1.6.3 on Windows Server 2003

  • July 3, 2009
  • James Skemp
For a business to implement version control, they typically want some kind of support, preferrably that they need to pay for, and that may or may not be used, and that may or may not be helpful. Luckily, CollabNet offers certified binaries of Subversion, available for the low price of the time needed to register. Additionally, they offer support, training, installation, and hosted solutions, in addition to the large Subversion community. Compared to the other solutions out there, including Microsoft's, there's really no question on what your first choice should be.

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Multiple network adapters in VirtualBox, for Windows guests

  • July 2, 2009
  • James Skemp
Having just upgraded to VirtualBox 3.0.0, I was running into an issue with being able to access a Windows Server 2003 guest from my Windows Vista host machine. By default, when creating a Windows Server 2003 guest machine the Network settings are set such that Adapter 1 is PCnet-FAST III, attached to NAT. This allows the virtual machine to get outside, but not in. However, it's possible to add a second adapter, attached to the host-only adapter.

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Browser environments for testing

  • November 20, 2008
  • James Skemp
In a previous post I mentioned using virtual machines for testing. Here's the three virtual machines that I feel cover the most options for browser testing (on Windows):  Current versions Looking at the top 10 browsers for this site, using data from Google Analytics, we have; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Mozilla, Opera, Playstation 3, Konqueror, SeaMonkey, and Camino. Of those, Internet Explorer and Firefox, obviously, account for the largest amount of traffic, at about 86% of all visits.

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How to really compact Virtual PC hard drives

  • November 18, 2008
  • James Skemp
No names mentioned, but I've recently been using a number of virtual machines for testing purposes. One machine has Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 2 installed, while a second has Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, and the most recent versions of Opera, Safari (for Windows) and Chrome. However, the virtual hard drives were 10 GB each, due to a large number of apps being installed that didn't need to be, for our browser-based testing.

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