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Why does it help to know about virtualization from a programmer's perspective? Except testing and developing on several different platforms without the need of switching between operating systems is there a particular reason why virtualization is important for a programmer? Are there any details that must be kept in mind before developing on virtual instances?
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Virtualization also enables us to allow developers to closely mimic a production server environment. In this way, less time is spent on configuring and maintaining an engineer's development environment. With this approach, each developer can have a clone of the production environment.
Virtual Machines lend themselves well to testing different configurations and setups. Developers can use VM snapshots to try various scenarios, and then quickly and easily restore the environment. This allows developers and software testers to identify configuration problems before end users run into them.
Virtualization provides on-demand access to an infinite number of perfectly replicated virtual machines for developers to play with. Developers take advantage of virtualization to help them expedite updates, improve software security, and maintain an efficient pipeline between development, testing, and deployment.
I use it for testing our installer, because it is important to check whether the application will work on a clean installation of the operating system.
I used to do these tests by keeping a hard drive with a fresh operating system installation and making a copy of that disk for (almost) every new test run. This was very time consuming, and the virtual machine solution has saved me a lot of time. Note that this even allows you to do remote debugging as easily as when using two non-virtual machines.
Note: If you're interested, I'm using VirtualBox, which is a very good and free virtualization tool.
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If you develop a driver or something very close to the hardware with a high risk to crash the machine, you will be glad to be working on a virtual machine.
Reverting to an old state is easier than to repair a damaged OS.
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