Pros and Cons of Developing on a VM on a PC

Question

I recently build myself a semi beef up PC (Q9450, 8GB DDR2 1066, 1TB HDD, Dual 8600GT, Vista Ultimate and Dual 22' Monitors) and I'm evaluating whether i should develop on a VPC/VMWare session on top of Vista or not?

One benefit I can see is that I can run the same VM on my Vista laptop so my development environment is the same on any of my machines. I also plan on purchasing a MBP before the end of the year as well.

Found a couple of articles online that semi-help Here

Any other thoughts would be really appreciated?

Answer 1

For webdevelopment I like to have the serverpart separeted out into a VM. My current setup is a Macbook Pro with several Debian VM's inside. I like the isolation aspect of it. I can try new software on the servers and have the ability to revert them back if something is messed up.

I do the programming via network-share (samba) in Textmate on the host system.