How I Use VMWare Fusion and Snapshots – Snook.ca.

We’re all likely very familiar with virtual machines. With each of us needing to test our product in as many applicable environments as possible, The Gauntlet, a virtual machine setup takes a bit of pain out of the equation as it adds a bit of convenience. Gone are the days of needing multiple machines to make sure your testing is accurate, we can run a number of virtual machines locally and call it a day.

My story is super similar to Jonathan’s. I’ve been using VMware since picking it up in beta near the time I first switched to Mac. I had looked over the shoulder of Parallels users and disliked what I saw, plus I was using VMware products in Linux for quite some time to run Windows to run Adobe apps, so it was familiar territory for me.

As Jonathan mentioned in his article, a number of people opt for something like IETester in an effort to keep the number of virtual machines to a minimum. IETester is a fantastic product for quick testing in my eyes, but there’s something more comforting about a native test for me.

Since reinstalling my local development environment not long ago, I went the Snapshot route. So far it’s a small bit more of a hassle in execution, a bit more disk space, but to me it’s a happy medium between full-on virtual machines for each browser install and using IETester, which is not a native environment.

What’s your story? By all means hop in the conversation going on over at snook.ca.