How do you best test commercial windows .NET applications on different environments? (XP, Vista, Win 7, Terminal server, Citrix)
I was thinking of MS Virtual PC, together with some ghosting software like Acronis .. http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/
What are good, tested test setups ? 🙂
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Thanks to the help of volodi and lukas I’ve now come a bit further:
It seems like VMWare Workstation is the perfect software solution for this problem. You can take snapshots of configurations, so we don’t even need any imaging software anymore. Plus, it has a price of 189 $… sweet …
Now a few extra problems however we encountered :
- In vmware, it is recommended you store your vm’s on your LOCAL disk. Saving to a network or USB drive is possible, but you need PocketACE, and you’ll have to store it first locally, then convert which seems cumbersome …
So we are thinking of buying a new laptop with 1TB Disk space. We would use this laptop solely for testing purposes.
Where do you store your virtual machines ?
-> Store it on a network drive or local disk… this was a misunderstanding …
- Now another problem seems backing up … How you’re gonna backup 500 GB of data ? That seems like a lot of work …
-> Well this was a misunderstanding. If you create a new machine, you have to allocate 40GB of space. So we thought, we need 8 machines, 8 x 40 = 320 GB …
This is wrong, a vm is +/- 3-6 GB … The vm disk size seems to grow dynamically
- Also, should i buy a 64-bit machine ?
-> If you want to testCitrix XenServer, you will need a 64-bit processor …
I am using VMWare, I liked linked clone feature that creates a temporary clone of certain configuration. VMWare supports more OSes. You can check “Comparison of platform virtual machines“