For months I've thought about the power of virtual machines. I use them all the time now for production and staging servers and in the past I've used them for QA purposes in a lab. However I have never run a VM instance on my own box.

Recently I purchased a VMWare Workstation 6.5 license on the cheap and on a re-wipe of my laptop decided to put it into use. I now have multiple XP VMs, a Win Server and an OpenSUSE distro. I am now able to have multiple server setup options at my fingertips with ease.

Setup
After several setup attempts I think I have found a great mix.

1. All of my development tools and code are located on my real machine.
2. All of my services are located on a VM
3. All of my services via UNC paths call on files from the HOST machine.
   • This allows me to have multiple servers from multiple VMs reference [easily] the same code set.

Things To Pay Attention To

1. Setting up the networking can be difficult the first time, but it really is easy. I choose to run everything in NAT mode; just make sure your firewall settings are all correct. I've also made all of my Windows machines part of the same workgroup to make some file browsing easier.
2. Permissions: In my case I created a VMUser in my VMs that was an admin/root and on my main box created that same user. I made sure VMUser had read/write too all of the relevant files. I then made sure all of my services were running as that user.
3. Flex / Flash Development and Debugging: Because you will be launching your debugging on an IP such as 192.168.248.x instead of 127.0.0.1 your Flex Builder will be unable to attache to the debug tool from the browser. When you launch your flash/flex app right click on the flash app area. When you click you will see a menu item "Debugger"; click it. You will get the following pop-up. When you do change the selected option from localhost to other machine and enter 127.0.0.1. Viola, your debugger will now attache!
   
   

So far my experience is extremly positive. I recomend a minimum of 4 gigs; this is what I currently have and I would want no less. My next laptop will definetly have either 6 or 8 gigs to allow me to run multiples at the same time, or maybe even make a VM my full time editing area. VMs can do multi-monitor BTW! I would love to have my base OS be basically naked and be able to more easily do snapshots and go backwards in time. For me, setting up all the servers takes the most time. Now I can just backup my VMs and on a future wipe of my box, literally be up and running in say an hour instead of 5 or 6.

Are you getting the error "Channel.Connect.Failed error NetConnection.Call.Failed: HTTP: Status 200"? I thought I bloged about this last month but apparently not. Upon upgrading to IE8 on my Windows XP Pro dev box I could not get any of my flex apps with AMF services to work. It appears as though not everyone hits this wall, even in my own test, it works from Windows 7 but not from XP.

The Adobe Bug entry for this has picked back up speed thanks to some votes and new supporting comments. I'm really suprised this has not gotten more attention, but maybe for some reason this isn't as wide spread as it could be. Or it's just that IE8 addoption is that low?

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-21005

I've recently been bumping into an annoying Connect bug/interface issue that has been causing me headaches. If you are administering a Connect server with a large audience this might be of interest.

My growing issue has been recordings with no sound. At first the easy blame was on the users. However after some review, it turns out that there is a flow issue with the Adobe Connect interface that I can easily reproduce in 2 ways.

1. If the meeting you are entering is locked you will be presented with a notification in the top right. If you attempt to press the hands-free button while this notification is present the hands free will appear locked. However you will not be presented with the “Camera and Microphone Access” dialogue and audio capture will not work (despite indication). 
2. If you select the hands-free button before the Share window has been completely rendered and resized you will get the same results as #1.
   

I'm guessing that this is not a major work flow issue for many. However as Connect becomes more familiar to our users, they are executing setup at a faster rate.

We have adjusted documentation to reflect this issue and warn our Hosts to make sure that they are asked for permission to use the microphone; if they are not, they are directed to unselect and reclick the hands-free lock button. I'll also be contacting Adobe with this little tid-bit through support while we try to work out a playback stability issue as well...

I was trying to access an ColdSpring generated remote facad from Flex this morning when I got this error. It worked just fine by calling CFINVOKE and by calling the CFC directly in the browser. From my flash/flex app it however did not work. I hit my head for several minutes before finding the utmost simple solution.

I have multiple CF instances and it turns out that I did not fully setup the current instance to my liking. So if you see this error, check to make sure that your use-mappings settings is set to true in your services-config.xml file. Flipping this switch resolved my issue.

<use-mappings>true</use-mappings>

This walk through will help you setup Win32 Apache 2.2.x with an SSL test environment using a self signed certificate that I will also show you how to create. I will use my full paths to help with the comprehension.

The post is a bit long, so please [read more] to view the entire walk through