Virtual machines are becoming more and more popular these days. I first ran into this about 8 years ago when a client suggested that we do a Great Plains test upgrade on a vmware machine. I was really skeptical when they explained the concept. I figured with SQL 7, windows NT server running in a machine that was already running windows NT workstation have disaster written all over it. They client had a dual processor machine with a full gig of RAM (that was a lot in those days) and the sample upgrade worked great.
Today I use VMWare Server for development and Virtual PC for demos. I use VPC because everything Microsoft puts out in terms of demo and training images is on VPC and it works great. VMWare server is free and has a good console and from my perspective, and it allows me to have a bunch of test machines running all the time.
A few of my customers are also using VMWare ESX to consolidate servers. Microsoft now supports virtual environments for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
I haven't yet used Microsoft Virtual Server, so I cannot really comment at this point.
Another thing that I have started to use Virtual machines for is to setup a dedicated client for VPN setups.
Like most consultants, I have more than one customer (which may come as a dissappointment to some of my customers!) and because I work both locally and on international projects, I have a number of remote systems that I need to connect to. If you have ever attempted to install more than one VPN client on a single machine, most time you will realize that they do not play nice together. For example, installing a Cisco VPN on a machine that already has a Stonegate VPN installed generally will cause chaos for one or both VPN setups. Usually this is not an issue for most people as they only need the one to connect to the office.
However, I ran into this the other day and had to spend time uninstalling and reinstalling VPN setups, which takes time and also sometimes requires administrators to generate new keys, etc.
To get around this, I used VPC and setup a clean version of Windows XP for each VPN config I need. This will allow me to have multiple VPN setups without having to conflict with each other. You can even take this a step further and add these VMs to the customers domain for support and troubleshooting, without having to switch domains and screwing up your own setup.
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