[Cialug] OT Developer productivity - was: Which software to use for a SAN

[Zachary Kotlarek]

On Jul 7, 2010, at 11:31 AM, Matthew Nuzum wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 9:54 PM, Jeff Davis <me at digitaljeff.com> wrote:
> 
> I've seen some user productivity studies that shows giving developers very fast hardware to work on and optimizing the build process to give them instant feedback increases developer's effectiveness. As I remember it, the reason suggested is that it reduces distractions caused by delays. Distractions cause devs to make context switches which significantly hurts their output.
> 
> I'm curious if giving your developers virtual desktops gives them workstation performance or if they sacrifice a bit because of this.


Depending on load the VM setup could actually be faster than any desktop they could reasonably have, since you're running on hardware that's natively much faster -- a HS22 blade is not a slow machine and it's unlikely that everyone is going to have 2x Xeon-5600 workstations connected to a Fibre SAN at their desk.

Obviously if everyone hits compile at the same time, or if there are enough VMs that memory/etc. is limited that will not be true, but if peak usage is non-simultanious and each VM has enough resources the VM setup could be faster for the short bursts of intensive use you're talking about.

	Zach

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