LabVIEW Development Best Practices Discussions
VirtualBox Article
Excellent article John,
I myself am an avid user of VirtualBox. I have a number of pre-prepared VirtualBox operating systems set up with different LV installations in each. For every project I do, I start from one of these clean, up-to-date, installations knowing there will be no interference from other applications of versions of LV. Then when a project is finished, I move the whole Virtual Operating System off my machine onto a secure backup. This way anyone in my company can grab a copy at any time and pick up the work if future development opportunities arise, without having to consider if they need to install/uninstall anything. It works very well and I've had no trouble integrating any of the National Instruments software on guest OS's.
Is it acceptable to activate the native OS (e.g. Windows XP Pro SP3) on each VM with the same license?
I'm not sure, but I'd be willing to guess that this is not exactly acceptable in Microsoft's eyes. Probably no worries if you're just doing in-house development. (depending on your ISO policies etc.) But you would run into licensing issues if you tried to distribute the images.
What happens if you want to load the VM on another PC?
This is the best part!
You just "export" your VM from one PC, and "import" it into another. I've done this several times and it's a huge time saver.
You recommended activating the appliance before creating the VMs, so I'm trying to understand if that would work with a central repository. Or, is each VM hardware specific such that I cannot create a VirtualBox VM on one PC and open it on another?
Each VM *is* hardware specific. But when you export the VM, you're exporting the hardware too....since it's virtual. This means that regardless of the host PC, your VM is still running on the same virtual hardware.
Hi Eli,
I'll try to answer as much as I can:
I don't have any experience with VMWare or parallels, so I can't offer any differentaion or comparison. The free factor is pretty compelling. Also, parallels I believe is a Macintosh product, so that might be an obvious choice for Mac users.
As far as the activation goes, there have been a lot of questions about that. I have 2 suggestions. The first is to read the EULAs for Microsoft, NI, and Virtualbox Products thoproughly and understand what is and is not acceptable. The 2nd is an observation. When I've activated a Windows Key on a VM running on the same hardware as the host, it seems to activate withou fail every time. However, I have had some issues when moving that key to another hardware platform, so I would say trial and error is your best bet. Some on this thread have claimed to check the VMs in and out of a repository without problems, presumably across different hardware platforms.
As for VMs vs. disk partions, it seems to me that the advantages/disadvantages are mixed. I chose the VM so I can boot my main Windows 7 host and do everday tasks like email, browsing, Office apps, Accounting apps, etc. while leaving my LabVIEW development to the VMs. I do install the latest version of LabVIEW on my main host for issues that may arise on the VM, and also so I can do "power development" and use my three 26" monitors and have lots of diagram open simultaneously. Multiple monitos on VirtualBox is an advanced and somewhat cumbersome feature. If I were to use partitions, I would have to boot into a particular version for development, and reboot to do my everyday tasks.
The number of versions I keep go something like this:
The XP Appliance
LV 7.1.1 + realtime
LV 8.0 + PDA toolkit
LV 8.5.1
LV 8.6.1 + toolkits:internet, office, sql
LV 2009 + TestStand 4.2 + PDA + toolkits:internet, office, sql
The last one is the largest at about 15GB, the rest are smaller, especially the LV 7.1.1 at about 7G, and the appliance at about 2GB. Looks like a total of about 40GB
Hi
VirtualBox cannot pass through any PCI cards, as their drivers will require direct memory mapping. You would require a specialised virtual machien to do this. Systems like NI RealTime Hypervisor or Xen act as a bare metal hypervisor and interrupt any interrupts through to the virtual machines and automatically map memory. Hosted virtual systems cannot allow this. USB and ethernet devices can be passed through in a hosted virtual environment as they are software drivers and not DMA based. For DAQ you could try using CompactDAQ as this could be passed through, I haven't tried so cannot guarantee it would work, but it should 
. I looked at Xen a couple of years ago and it was going to be very hard to do this, and the amount of effort to get it to work versus getting a machine and ghosting it didn't seem to pay off. Things may well have changed by now.
Mike
Mike,
On the issue of CompactDAQ in VBox, I can confirm that it does work 
.
I've used CompactDAQ with LabVIEW 8.6.1 in XP within a virtual environment, hosted by Windows 7. I remember some small technical issues with VirtualBox managing to successfully pass the device through, which were a little frustrating, but in the end I managed to get it to work perfectly well. There have been a few new releases of VirtualBox since then that may have tackled these USB-related issues (I did all this about a year ago).
