Development Within a VM

I know what you're going to say, this post is so lame because we all know that virtualization is the only way to develop. But actually this is not what I am going to cover. Instead, I'm going to cover actually doing development within a VM environment. Doing the coding and building within that VM environment.

So here is the question; why would I want to do the actual development within a VM? The obvious draw to VM's is to allow a developer to simulate multiple machines at the same time which can then be reverted to a previously working state. So why do the development in a VM? Well pretty much for the same reason that one would do testing and QA in a VM environment.

For example, let us assume that we have a 1GB VM in Linux (mainly because this is what I program in). Let's also assume that I keep my E-Mail and IM in my underlying OS (let's assume that this is Windows) because I love the clients. So the question is why would I do this? The answer is pretty subtle; if you think about what your IDE and compiler can do for you and also knowing that there are tons of issues that you can experience with both of these. For example, if you do an upgrade you aren't going to be rolling back (mainly because this isn't an option) assuming that possibly an upgrade broke your library.

Let's take another example though; what would happen if your IDE went nuts and began hanging (let's assume that it's trying to download your entire SVN code repository or that it's trying to download every bug you've ever worked on). Or maybe your bug tracking software runs extremely slowly; this causes your IDE to hang everytime it goes to update it's local bug store. Well, if you have your development environment contained within a VM, there is no need to worry that all is lost. In my instance, I would still have access to my E-Mail/IM and would not be completely useless until my IDE responded.

Currently I am running the new VirtualBox, and it has fantastic implementations within Linux and Windows and works pretty well. I'm going to be doing development within VM's for a while and will be doing it at work as well. Now, if you have a separate box that you connect to for your development needs; then this really doesn't apply to you. But it is pretty close to what using a VM for development is.