VMWare makes my day

I have been using VMWare Workstation and GSX server for almost a year now. The possibilities enabled by these products is unnumbered.

• First of all it lets you put up development- and test enironments when and where you need them.
• Second, you can create snapshots and clones that easily can be reverted to a base install/configuration.
• It lets you distribute a environments salespersons or customers can play with, to see the status of you development efforts.
• When the physical development workstation or server cease working because of HW errors, the disks containing the virtual machines can just be reused in another machine.
• All reasons I may not have discovered yet, or may not be thinking of at this very moment when posting this...
  

The last one really saved my day recently. The motherboard on a development server, with 4 virtual machines, stoppped working and the virtual machines became very unavailable. The 3 projects depending on these virtual machines could not continue developing, which of course is not acceptable at all.
The solution was to mount the disks in another machine, which was far from able to run all these virtual machines, publish the virtual machines file on the LAN and copy them to servers able to run the servers temporarily. Some machines had VMWare Workstation, and others just downloaded VMWare player. After 1 long day of work the projects was more or less unaffected by the server crash.
The troubled server is now on it's way to a pc maintenance company, for repair. It should be easy to get the server updated with the virtual machines changed during repair.

The VMWare developers seems to really have got a pluggable architecture for it's Virtual Machines. The ability to just remap the hardware dependencies when moving virtual machines to other hardware and OSes impresses me, and makes it so fun to work with (in a geek way), that makes a project crisis solution fun to implement.

I hope I don't have to work with development environments installed directly on hardware anymore. Ever!

PS! By the way, Digital Fortress was a disappointment. Dan Brown has not made much research for this one. The plot is OK, but the rest is so boring that it it was a waste of time.