Virtual and Physical

It is time to start learning about virtual machines. Microsoft is kindly offering up free VMs to do browser testing. I find this exciting. Where I work we often have physical machines to host different Operating Systems, to accommodate different versions of our software. At least now from a testing perspective, in regard to client-side investigation, no one needs to pay Microsoft license fees just to see how a webpage renders in Internet Explorer.

This got me thinking that it would be equally beneficial to have VM Templates setup for the server side. With supporting more than one version of our product, it is often time consuming to setup a working server environment just for play.

I am hoping to learn enough to achieve virtualization of the server side for ‘already released’ editions of our software. Then I can turn my eye towards getting VMs auto-created as part of continuous integrations..!

Written on February 23, 2014