Virtual Machines, Real Productivity

摘要

Virtualization offers one answer to a major problem with software development: the consistency among developers' platforms. If the development environment is different from developer to developer, it's hard to isolate bugs in the software or identify what might be causing a problem. Is the problem in the code or the environment? Virtualization tackles this by letting the leaders of development teams deploy identical environments to all developers working on a project. The benefits include ease of deployment, avoiding installation hassles, and managing geographically diverse development teams. Watch out for the downsides, such as the considerable time it can take to create and transfer virtual images. But the payoff can make it worthwhile.