Hi all. I'm looking to clean up my development environments into discreet virtual machines, that I can use against multiple hosts. An ideal situation would be the ability to store the virtual machines on a central server, with both local streaming and remote access. For instance if I am working on my shoddy old laptop, I would only want a remote view (RDP\VNC etc) while the server runs the actual virtual machine. However, if I am at my desktop, it would be good to run the VM on that, since it is powerful enough and I wouldn't want to be bothered by network latency.
The server-host would be Linux, the remote-hosts would be Linux and Windows, the guests would be again Linux and Windows.
I've played around with VirtualBox and VMWare personal editions and found them both very useable for standalone work, but am looking for something more centralised. It seems to be that VMWare wins for the centrally-managed (able to fire up a VM from a web interface) but I'd need to install a VNC server on each guest to get the remote access. VirtualBox has built-in RDP\VNC for each guest, but I can seem to find a way of powering up the VM without being on the host GUI.
Anyone with more hands-on experience would be most welcome to help sort out my confusion.
Many thanks.