Best development virtualisation environment

Question

We're big fans of conducting all our development in virtual machines, mainly for the following reasons:

• Everyone has a common build which we ask to be kept "clean" of other installed "stuff"
• Easy of deployment - up and running in an hour or two, rather than a day or two if you need to install our dev stack onto a clean machine

We've used the following virtualisation products

• Virtual PC - nice desktop integration (e.g. drag & drop from host) but limited to single core support
• Virtual Server - really a server VM, limited to single core
• VMServer - multi-core support but really annoying freezes when using cut & paste in VS2008, really a server VM
• VMPlayer - multi-core support, some desktop support, but no drag & drop from host, can't build VMs in it
• VirtualBox - single core support and limits memory to half that of host.

Are there any other mainstream VM technologies we've missed and does anyone else have good things to say for this approach?

I should add that I have the following requirements:

• want to run this on my dev laptop, on top of Vista, so the Hypervisor style VMs are probably less useful?
• I have lots of real cores, so want to expose more than one to the VM
• I have lots of memory, so I want to expose lots of that to the VM
• Drag & drop from the desktop is very helpful. Our test VMs have no networking and can't use Shared Folders.

Answer 1

Hyper-V server - free real hypervisor.
Windows 2008 Server with Hyper-V.
VMWorkstation

Answer 2

I would say VirtualBox from sun.

Actually Xen would be the bestfor server virtualisation

Answer 3

I mainly use my Mac for development and currently I use Parallels although Vritualbox is handy because I can use cross platform VM's.

For server and demo environments we use Hyper-V R2 HyperVisor and for local Windows virtualization, specifically SharePoint, we use VirtualBox for 64Bit guest support.

Answer 4

For development I'd highly recommend VMWare Workstation. Workstation is really aimed at software developers. I think you can allocate up to two processors and 8Gb RAM per VM.

VMware have a record/replay feature (video demo over at http://is.gd/eJOe) which is great for debugging. It hooks directly into Visual Studio. Plus you get pretty good DirectX support, drag and drop, usb support, multicore VMs, etc. as well as all the usual features that you'll find in other products.