I have what may be a unique situation (or not) - our IT Director has locked down access to the native laptop and forces all developers to use only VMs as their development machine/environment. The project I'm on needs to produce code that runs on both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. The VM environments are 32-bit only. My team has access to (extra) licensed copies of Vista 32-bit and 64-bit. The laptop has both hard-wired and WiFi NICs. This renders out main laptop essentially useless and thus, the only thing it would be used for is email, browsing and Microsoft Office 2007.
We use VMWare Workstation 6.5. We want to:
1. Turn the current physical machine (and IT-installed software) into a (32-bit) VM such that it (the VM) uses the Ethernet NIC as it's NIC and the VM is still a member of the corporate domain and thus looks, to the admin's system management tools, just like the original laptop. Then the sysadmin's automated sign-on scripts, etc., would still run and the sysadmin'sforced updates/installs would still occur, only to the VM and not to the physical laptop.
2. Put Vista 64-bit on the laptop and set it up any way we desire, and install the complement of Microsoft's 32 and 64-bit tools. Configure the Vista 64-bit laptopto only use the WiFi network connection (thus making it not directly accessible to IT since it would be on the "outside" network which is always available for visitors).
The theory is that the 64-bit Vista would make the entire 4GB of physical RAM available for us to use as desired/necessary (e.g. running a scaled-down VM which looks like the corporate laptop plus a couple other VMs in server mode to simulate our server-side environment).
Comments? Suggestions?
Tags:
workstation_6.5,
physical,
clone
