VMWare Drupal for Local Development

It faster. Much faster. I do all my development in a windows environment. I have used a variety of WAMP stacks; XAMPP, Acquia etc. While these are easy to use and easy to setup, they are not fast (I welcome comments about speed fixes). I recently moved to using a local VMware Appliance. The speed difference is worth noting first. Running both XAMPP, Acquia and the Appliance on the same machine, VMWare was many times faster.

From a top level this makes sense. The VMWare gets top priority for system resources. While XAMPP and Acquia run as services, that need to compete for local Windows resources. Again I welcome feedback on why VMWare is faster.

Setup:
1. Install the VMWare Player (Free).
2. Download the Drupal 6 Turnkey Linux Appliance. (Free)
3. Create a Local Folder in My Documents Folder.
4. Start the WMWare Appliance. Notice the IP addres. Run in bridge mode.
5. Open the WMPlayer setup and create a shared folder pointing to your My Documents folder.
6. Drop some modules or themes into the My Documents Folder (Working Folder).
7. Log into the Appliance.
8. CD /mnt
9. mount -t vmgfs .host:/ /mnt
10. The mount will create a mounted folder in the Appliance with the name you defined in the VMware Player shared folder setup.
11. Note: ls will not show the mount. I found I have to cd up and back into the /mnt to see it.
12. Create a sym link from your drupal site folder to the folder in the mounted folder. There are a number of different solutions. Since drupal on the appliance has a number of contrib modules sitting in the /sites/all/modules folder, I like to my the symlink as a folder called custom. /sites/all/modules/custom. This exposes any files or folders in the /mnt/workspace/... to drupal.

Advanced Note: If you reboot the appliance, the mount will disappear. If you save the mount command into a Startup script in the appliance setup, it will save the effort each time you, or when you reboot the appliance.

The script option is in the https://applianceID:12322 web admin application.