Thanks to everybody that came along to the user group session last week. Thanks also to Robert and Dean for presenting; I think you'll agree, the whole virtualisation thing is very interesting. In addition to the benefits you get by virtualising the various environments used within a software development project, a couple of use cases I find compelling are :

• Virtualising the continuous integration environment : no more excuses for not having enough hardware.
• Building a virtualised non-functional test environment : this makes testing aspects such as scalability, availability, resilience, fault-tolerance, etc much easier.

Switching to the desktop, we talked about the use of virtualisation to standardise developer desktops, which is an interesting idea although I'm not sure there was a general consensus on whether it's a *good* idea. Something I did like, however, was using virtualisation to solve the problem of getting access to different environments for web browser compatability testing. You can use the free VMware Player to run whichever OS and browser combination you need (assuming you have the virtual machines, of course).

The next user group has been booked for Thursday, 6th December and the topic will be "From Developer to Architect". I'll post the full details later in the week.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 12 November 2007 19:36:29 GMT #