Recently my team has spent too many hours setting up machines with previous product releases or database servers with specific patches. In some cases, we have taken a developers machine down for up three days as a result. Clearly, this would be an ideal case for using a virtual machine. I am trying to champion the practice of making a virtual image of customer releases. I’ve used VMware effectively in the past for development and testing purposes, but I was wondering if anyone had any other virtualization tools they have had good experience using?
We are doing development in Java on Windows XP machines.
VMWare is the best out there IMHO.