What's your development hardware?

A developer's machine can never be fast enough. That's a basic truth, as software is generally known to become more slowly in time than hardware gets faster ;-)

Currently I have the following hardware & operating system that runs my Visual Studio 2008:
- 2 Physical Quad Core Xeon 3,2GHz processors
- 16GB of RAM
- 6x 10.000 rpm HD in RAID 10
- Windows Server 2003 x64

You might think I am a little bit of a dissipater when using such a powerful machine just for my own development. Yes, you are right - it's not my personal machine at all - I share this machine with my colleagues. Using such a machine under my desk would be physically possible indeed, but not very bearable because of the heat and noise. So we surely use terminal clients to access our development machine. This works okay if your network latency is constantly below 50msec; I noticed perfect working with less then 20msec.

So, what's the conclusion of this information?

I personally love development on remote and really fast machines in a team for over 1 year now as is bears a great set of benefits:

• Everyone can and has to use the intended development environment (no more plugging around trying to get supplied components to run)
• Share Data in a msec with colleagues
• Attach to the desktop of a colleague a work in a shared environment in seconds (e.g. for instant developer support)
• Get new developers into your team and let them start to work in minutes
• Access your Source Code Repository via 1GB LAN on a machine nearby
• No more different versions on different machines (Desktop/Laptop)
• Work from everywhere in your famillar environment
• Have your checked out code backed up and physically redundant automatically
• Fast access to developer DB's as they probably stand nearby the development server
• ...

Of course I still have other Visual Studio's installed on my Laptop or on dedicated virtual machines for offtopic development and beta tests. But that's a completely different use case.

If you like this idea or if you have similar approaches feel free to contact me to share the ideas :-)