I need to set up a test environment on my XPSP3 machine that runs Apache, MySQL, and PHP. My original test environment was an old box that ran those three under Win2k. That box died. Running on Windows was never optimal because the ultimate hosting environment is CentOS Linux.
What is the most straightforward way to set up a virtual machine on XP these days? I don’t want to spend all my time tinkering with the test environment when I could be coding.
As a follow-up question, how important is it to use the same distro on my test environment as my deployment? I don’t know CentOS at all, but I’m comfortable with Fedora or Ubuntu.
Download free VMWare player and install one of the pre-made Open Source LAMP VMs from the VMWare appliance marketplace. VMs are also available in many places other than the appliance marketplace.