i have a spare laptop that has been collecting dust for a while now and i haven’t been able to figure out how to make it useful. but over the weekend, i have finally found a good cause for it.
the ultimate testing machine has a bunch of VMs on it.
1) Windows XP w/ IE 6
2) Windows XP w/ IE 7
3) Windows XP w/ IE 8
4) Windows Vista w/ IE 7
5) Windows Vista w/ IE 8
6) Fedora Core 11
all windows VMs also have Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Firefox 3.5, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.
the host OS is Mac OS X, where I have installed Safari, Firefox, and Opera. so if there’s a browser/OS config i want to test, i think i have the popular platforms covered. now, if there was only an easy way to have different versions of flash installed…i guess i can 2x the number of VMs i have…
How much hard drive space do all of your VM instances take up? I’m at 29GB for my IE6 and IE7 instances on my laptop. Too much!
I get conflicting reports. Finder reports:
5 total Windows VMs occupy 38GB.
4.3GB Windows XP – IE 6
4.5GB Windows XP – IE 7
5.9GB Windows XP – IE 8
10.8GB Windows Vista – IE 7
11.3GB Windows Vista – IE 8
But if I open up Terminal and do a du:
9.0GB Windows XP – IE 6
9.5GB Windows XP – IE 7
12.6GB Windows XP – IE 8
22.7GB Windows Vista – IE 7
23.6GB Windows Vista – IE 8
so i don’t know what’s going on there…
i don’t think that i would ever install all these versions on my primary laptop, it’s a lot of hard drive space. my primary laptop has 1 Windows VM which is booting from a boot camp partition so that i can dual boot.
Might they be like sparse disk images… that only show the actual space versus the virtual space?
ah, i think you are right.