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I really like VMware's virtualization. Workstation is well worth the price. You can set up several server VM's on one box, and then use that for Dev, and Staging boxes if you like. And, you can set up a separate SVN repo on a different VM as well. If your box starts to bog down, it's as easy as copying and pasting the VM to another machine without losing anything.

And, if you want to deploy an entire VM to Amazon's EC2 service, Enominalism sells a tool to do that: http://www.enomalism.com/features/amazon-ec2-migration/

Also, it's possible to set up virtual networks between separate VM's, so you can model a 3 tier architecture and test your DB + Middleware setup if you like as well.

It's worth looking in to.




+1 for VMWare.

If you're on-the-cheap, you may also want to check out VMWare Player and the virtual appliances. I had a Workstation license, but it was from nearly 4 years ago and didn't work with many of the newer Linux distributions (notably Ubuntu). So I downloaded Player and an Ubuntu Gutsy virtual appliance, and was up-and-running in about 5 minutes.


VMWare Server is free and allows you to create new VMs (and comes with the VM addons for various OSes).

It allows you to start up VM at boot time, etc hence the "Server" name.

The drawback is that it installs a bunch of services.

Microsoft's VirtualPC 2007 is (was?) free and more of a single package, but I found VMWare Server to be faster.

VirtualBox is also available and open source.


I've used http://www.easyvmx.com to create new blank machines instead of downloading the appliances and installed my own system from scratch.




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