Virtual Machine Assisted Development

A virtual machine is “software that creates a virtualized environment between the computer platform and its operating system, so that the end user can operate software on an abstract machine” according to Wikipedia. So you can be running OSX on a Mac, and have Windows or Linux running within that instance of OSX. You are not booting the computer into Windows, but you are able to load it on top of your operating system. In this article I discuss how virtual machines can assist your development efforts and make you more productive.

Software development often requires the ability to test programs on multiple operating systems and setups. Web development especially benefits from this sort of testing. But what if you don’t have the resources for many machines? What if one works just fine if only you could use it to test many different environments. That is where a virtual machine comes in handy.

You can test your development work using one high-powered computer and virtualization technology from VMWare or Parallels. This enables me to test work on Windows from a Mac. I recently used a VM instance of Windows XP to finally test the design of this site and debug numerous issues that were stopping the site from looking the way I had originally intended. The site didn’t look right in any browser, and now it looks perfect in at least IE and Firefox.

Unfortunately Apple does not want people running OSX on a non-Apple computer, and VMWare and Parallels have followed their lead. So while it is possibly to run OSX on any computer, the big names in virtualization software don’t yet plan to make it easy to do so. But if you use a Mac for development this can greatly assist your development. And if you use Windows you can test many different setups and versions of Windows, along with other operating systems such as Linux. You can do a lot by spending a little.