I forgot to schedule the post below. It is still relevant if you create a machine with lots of Delphi versions on it.
Below are some VM disk sizes I have used. Note that for Windows 7+ you need to keep at least 3 gigabyte free space to perform some of the updates. For Delphi XE3 and higher you need progressively more free disk space to be able to install at all. So far, a safe margin seems to be about 15 gigabytes.
- 20 gigabyte
- Windows 7 x64+ Office 2010 + all updates
- Windows 8.x x64 + Office 2013 + all updates
- +7 gigabyte
- + Delphi 2007 Architect December 2007 + InterBase 2007 Developer + Documentation (all 3rd party stuff, except Collabnet and Installaware)
- I didn’t bump into the Delphi 2007 install issues that twm had, but I had the NetFx3 install done by hand before I tried.
- IDEFixPack 4.4 doesn’t work (it throws up a type initializer error), but IDEFixPack 2007 4.3 does.
- +4 gigabyte
- + Delphi XE Architect Update 1 + InterBase 2009 Developer + Documentation
- +9 gigabyte
- + Delphi XE2 Architect Update 4 with hotfix 1 + InterBase XE x64 Developer + Documentation
- +14 gigabyte
- + Delphi XE3 Architect Update 2 + Documentation
- +16 gigabyte
- + Delphi XE4 Enterprise Update 1 + InterBase XE3 x64 Developer + Documentation
- +29 gigabyte; make sure you start with at least 32 gigabytes free disk space or the install will fail
- + Delphi XE5 Enterprise Update 2 + Documentation
- It didn’t want to install at first (Windows 8.1 indicated “This app can’t run on your PC. To find a version that runs on your PC, contact the software publisher.”, which was because the download of the ISO file wasn’t right: file size was OK: wish more vendors would published md5 sums of their ISO downloads).
- I install my own GExperts build you can get by downloading 20130912-GExperts-experimental-twm.zip from https://bitbucket.org/jeroenp/gexperts-formatter/downloads.
- +7 gigabyte
- + Delphi 2007 Architect + InterBase 2007 Developer
Notes:
- I skipped Delphi 2009 because it had too many compiler generics issues, and 2010 because it had too many compiler x64 issues.
- For Delphi, I always install the IDEFixPack, DDevExtensions, GExperts (with the TWM experimental build), then run Delphi once, then install ModelMaker Code Explorer (this way GExperts is bound to Alt-X, and MMX to Alt-M in the main menu of the IDE).
- For Visual Studio, I always install CodeRush.
- For Windows 8.x, you need to explicitly enable the “NetFx3” feature to run .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 applications. The easiest way to do this is to run this command line in an ELEVATED COMMAND PROMPT (Runas Administrator) where D: is the drive your your Windows 8.x installation DVD:
DISM /Online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:NetFx3 /All /LimitAccess /Source:D:\sources\sxs
- You might want to install and activate IIS and ASP.NET for the various .NET platforms.
Directories to compress to save disk space:
- C:\Users\Public\Documents\RAD Studio\*.0
- C:\ProgramData\{*}
- C:\ProgramData\Microsoft Help
- C:\Program Files (x86)\*\RAD Studio\*.0\bin*
- C:\Program Files (x86)\*\RAD Studio\*.0\help
- C:\Program Files (x86)\*\RAD Studio\*.0\include
- C:\Program Files (x86)\*\RAD Studio\*.0\lib
- C:\Program Files (x86)\*\RAD Studio\*.0\Redist
- C:\Program Files (x86)\*\RAD Studio\*.0\source
- C:\Program Files (x86)\*\RAD Studio\*.0\help
- C:\Program Files (x86)\*\RAD Studio\*.0\bin
I’ve used these GDB service names and port numbers to distinguish various IB/FB versions using gds_db to quickly switch to any IB/FB version:
service port database internal version gds_db 3050 any any gds_75 30575 InterBase 7.5 7.5.x gds_2007 30580 InterBase 2007 8.0.x gds_2009 30590 InterBase 2009 9.0.x gds_xe 31500 InterBase XE 10.0.x gds_xe3 31510 InterBase XE3 11.0.x gds_10 30510 Firebird 1.0 1.0.x gds_15 30515 Firebird 1.5 1.5.x gds_20 30520 Firebird 2.0 2.0.x gds_21 30521 Firebird 2.1 2.1.x gds_25 30525 Firebird 2.5 2.5.x gds_30 30530 Firebird 3.0 3.0.x
–jeroen