Rinat Abdullin

Never host any services critical for the customer on your development server "just till he gets the new server". You would not be able to easily move them off your back, even when you leave the project.

Finally, today I'll be able to stop my dev server, upgrade it to Windows Server 2008 64 bit with Hyper-V and get going. This means:

• Ability to set up CruiseControl.NET 1.4 on a separate virtual machine, clean up existing integration projects and finally add the continuous integration support for the Autofac Contrib (Nick, sorry for the delay). BTW, running integration server for any open source project inside virtual machine is important, since the build process itself is a huge security vulnerability. Although this approach does not eliminate it completely, it does reduce the threat (and the potential damage) quite a bit.

• Ability to set up separate virtual environments to test the infrastructure of the current development project, run deployment and integration scenarios on this local sandbox etc.

• Ease and flexibility of deploying, saving, copying and migrating different deployment and development scenarios (think of the logical encapsulation of some development or production subsystem at the OS image level)
• Ability to leverage continuous integration, testing and auto-deployment under different OSes and software configurations (not that I expect to need this ability in the next 6 months)
• Valuable experience of structuring and managing development workflows in the environment where VM is a cheap resource that could be created, deployed and deleted within a single integration build (we are not there yet, but that's where the technology goes).

All-in-all, virtualization is going to be a big hit next years. Especially, with the Hyper-V by Microsoft (kernel-level virtualization technology built into Windows Server 2008) that comes at the cost of peanuts (VMWare has got some decent competition in their market niche). Just check out this great podcast for the details and some inspiration.

Update: here's the description of the installation process along with some caveats and tips.

PS: I wonder, when .NET will finally get this construct (captures all details of the exception in VMI with the debugger attached):

catch (Exception ex)
{
  get new VirtualMachineImage(ex);  
}

PPS: VMWare has just made their move on the market by rolling out free hypervisor.