Most of my client websites are designed using the Joomla Content Management System. This software requires several back-end server applications including Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. A lot of people still develop websites using a traditonal web-hosting provider, however this relies on someone elses server architecture, and the requirement that you have an Internet connection. When developing a site from scratch and you are constantly changing things, and trying out new ideas the slower speed can stifle your creativity, which is bad!
So, what to do? Well we could invest in a separate PC or server to run our website server applications. There is nothing wrong with this solution, especially if you have some unused and suitable hardware lying around that you can install Linux onto, however most of us don’t have that luxury.
Another option would be to use software that enables you to run your webserver application(s) concurrently with your existing desktop OS. This means utilising some from of virtualisation software.
This is my preferred way of working, and means I can take all my web development and server applications with me on the road, and can beaver away quite happily designing websites, even without an Internet connection. Another big advantage of this method of working is response times. Having your webserver sitting locally on your laptop means you are faster, and more productive. The whole website development cycle is simply more snappy.
There are a lot of different ways to implement a virtualised solution and I am a big fan of VMware’s products, having used them for more than six years. As an aside, I use their ESXi product for server consolidation, and VMware has a lot to recommend it. For website design, I had previously used VMware Player, another free product from VMware that sits on top of Windows and provides support for running multiple operating systems on your PC. Recently however I have started using Virtual Box (now owned by Sun) and have found it very easy to use, very stable, and modest in hardware requirements. It seems slightly less heavy then VMware player, and I prefer their way of assigning network interfaces. There is even an OS X version for you Mac afficionados!!
I have a Sony Dual Core laptop (Intel P8400 2.26Ghz) with 3GB of memory, and with this configuration I can comfortably run Windows 7 as my primary operating system, with Virtual Box handling my Linux server applications for my website design requirements. You can run virtualisation software on older machine, but I would recommend a fairly modern system, as running multiple operating system puts more strain on the processor/memory/storage subsystems.
Try and get a system that supports Intels VT-x or AMD’s AMD-V. These are hardware features built into your CPU that will assist virtualisation software. It’s a nice to have (if you want to run a virtualised 64-bit operating system on a 32-bit host system it is a must) and will provide some performance improvements. For further info on this subject see here – hardware assisted virtualisation . Be warned it’s not light reading!
