Virtual OS? now I am really confused!
Referring to Orcas March 2007 CTP,I came across this on the installation guide
Download the Base image (one-time only): Save the self-extracting base imageVSCTPBase.exeand extract to a folder on your computer. This base contains the Operating system and is common to all "Orcas" CTPs
Is this Operating System Vista?,or a fancy name for the CLR?
I dont get the point why you need a virtual operating system on the same machine? Where does the .net fx 3 come in all of this then? is it a part of the Virtual OS itself then?
Hello Ganesh,
You have a valid query.
To specificaly answer your querry, it is neither Vista nor CLR. It is a virtual image having Windows Server 2003 OS in it.
Besides this, there will be another ORCAS vhd (multiple .rar files) which will contain the entire Orcas, VS 2005, SQL Server 2005, .NET 2.0/.NET 3.0 even .NET 3.5 etc.
Further Explaination to why Virtual Image:
Assume if you need to install all the ORCAS related software on your existing machine, how cumbersome it will be to insatll all the software right from .NET 2.0/3.0 to SQL Server 2005 to VS Orcas edition and how long would it take.
Just to come out of this problem, term Virtual Image comes into the picture. This .vhd(Virtual Hard-disk) image is pre-configured image having all the softwares pre-installed in it, and since all the software require an OS to run upon. This virtual image also requires a separate OS copy (known as Base image), other than your host machine's OS, which can be downloaded as VSCTPBase.exe and extracted into Base01.vhd (2.72 GB), you have talked about in your question above.
So now there are two things OS (also known as Base Image) for Virtual Image and Virtual Hard-disk (havng all the software). This is the reason Microsoft Orcas team provided one time download of the OS (base Image) Virtual IImage named Base01, and keep on downloading up-coming ORCAS vhds. But OS virtual image will remain same to Base01 and this is why one time download VSCTPBase.exe.
Summary:
The reason of using virtual image to a developer would be that the .vhd image is the pre-configured image which comes with all the softwares installed on it, you just download it and start working.
- Assue what if you were to install all the required software and it will take a lot of time., so you are getting an image all the software pre-installed on it.
- As technology is in Pre-release/CTP form; if it comes with some bugs or faults which may affect/crash your OS or any other softawre, the whole virtual environment (.vhd) is isolated and will not affect your host OS and softwares, as you can discard it any time.
Hope you will find it useful.
Thanks and Regards
