Question

What do you recommend for quickly creating images for testing a software product (that needs hardware access – full USB port access)? Does virtualization cover this? I need to be able to quickly re-image the system to test from scratch again, and need good options for Windows and Mac OS.

Answer 1

If virtual machines will work for you, you can choose between Virtual PC, VMWare and VirtualBox.

Virtual PC supports Win host and Win/linux guests. Although there are some caveats with regards to the X resolution support.

VMWare supports Win, OS X and Linux host. It supports Win and Linux guests.

VirtualBox supports same hosts and guests as VMWare.

None of the three supports OS X as guest officially. The reason is that OS X is licensed only for Apple machines. However, there are some hacks that allow installing OS X under VMWare. It might be also possible to install it under VirtualBox or Virtual PC, although I have not seen specific instructions.

If virtualization is not good enough for you, you can use precreated installation images or a disk imaging program.

For precreated installation images for Windows, you can use the sysprep tool (search for sysprep or system preparation tool). I don’t know if there are equivalent tools for OS X from Apple.

For disk imaging programs, I know quite a lot people swear by Symantec Ghost. I personally have not used it, so can’t give you much info about it. There’s also a list of disk imaging programs on Wikipedia, so you evaluate these as well.

Hope that helps.