I considered the number of hours it takes to set up all the various Visual Studios, SDKs, tools, etc.; how I try to keep my dev machine as clean as possible; and how all of the above fill the installed programs list with all the various SQL components and runtimes.
I decided to install them all in a VM, and use that as my dev platform; at least as an experiment.
I fired up Hyper-V and created a new VM and installed everything and tried to use it yesterday. It was a bit sluggish, though that couls just be because I'm used to an SSD for my system disk, and this is on a virtual disk that is on a spinning disk.
The main issue however, is that VS2012 keeps freezing. The UI freezes, and it's doing god knows what in the background. Usually it doesn't respond at all and either needs to be left alone for 15 minutes, or force closed. Occasionally I'll get the "Waiting for a background operation to complete..." message.
Has anyone else tried this? What were your results?
My VM is using hardware virtualization on a Core i7. The host has 16GB RAM and the client has 4GB (it's using half of that).
Note: A clue may be that I sometimes get low virtual memory messages.