I love VMs(virtual machines). The best thing about VMs is, you need not worry about your operating system crashes. Just take a backup of your VM-Image and you are done. Screw your OS they way you want and when you are done, just restore it from the backup! Whenever your machine crashes, copy the image from backup and start working again!
My test domain has two exchange servers, domain controller and test / development machines. Exchange servers and DC run on VM and development/test machines are physical machines. On my laptop I run exchange and DC as a VM and use laptop itself as a dev machine. This has a great advantage. I dont have any dependency on office for development(except to get the source code from CVS :)). All I need to do is to start my VMs and start working from wherever I want :)
Till date I have use 2 vmwares. On my PUNE setup I use GSX and in SC I use Microsoft Virtual Sever(VS) 2005. Both of them are pretty good, though I find VS 2005 more user friendly.
The only problem with VM is that they eat up lot of resources. You really need a high-end machine to run a VM. Luckily, all the mahchines which I have are of very good configuration. My laptop is a Dell machine with dual core processor and 2 GB RAM.
That was all about VMs. I found another exciting thing- Amazon Elastic Compute cloud (Amazon EC2). If leveraged properly, companies can save a lot on machine costs. You can have 100s of machines up and running within minutes and you get all these at a very nominal price! Add Amazon S3 to EC2 and you never need to worry about your data. There are few challenges though. I will write a detailed blog on EC2 sometime soon.
Till then ....
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