VMWare machines for testing websites

I use a variety of different virtualisation technologies on different computers to give me the most freedom. On PCs I use both VirtualBox VM and VMWare Player so that I can run older copies of Windows to test things with IE6 and so on;  I use Parallels on the MacBook Pro to run Windows 7, Visual Studio, and the occasional game; and I use VMWare Fusion on the MacBook Air as it seems to offer a good unified experience allowing the line between Windows and Mac to blur.

I’m using VMWare primarily for testing browsers, and I needed IE6 and IE7. In order to save some time I decided to clone the VM once I had installed XP, set up IE6, and added all the service packs and security fixes. This took a long time, as there are well over a hundred fixes that need to be done to bring it up to date. 

In order to speed up the process of creating a variety of testing environments with different browsers and tools it seemed natural to create copies of the virtual machine and modify them as necessary. The trick to cloning a virtual machine is easy - shut down the virtual Windows machine, and copy the VMWare machine using the Finder. When it has finished copying, open the VM in VMWare, and it will ask if it was copied or moved. When you chose copied, it will ask if it should change the system ID - as Windows XP doesn’t require activation answer yes. Edit the machine name and description so that you can tell the difference, then start it up and everything should be ok. All that was left for me to do was to install IE7 and get on with my work. This approach gets bonus point for being able to say ‘goodbye IE6, and good riddance’ with a simple click and delete when the time comes that I don’t have to test things with this antique web browser. That time will come soon. 

As time goes on I’m finding myself shifting more to VMs for development - I use an Ubuntu on the MacBook Air and another on the desktop PC purely to box it all up and make it easy to shift to other computers. I didn’t want to install all the experimental tools directly onto the machines to work with, and I don’t use them all the time in this capacity so it makes my life a lot easier, and if I mess them up I can just start again if I have to.