What kind of a virtualization solution would be ideal for developers?

Posted: (EET/GMT+2)

 

The holiday season is usually a good time to relax a bit, sit back and think about the passing year and look forward to the next one. Since my daily work revolves quite a bit in solving the problems customers have through software, I often find myself using virtualization solutions like Hyper-V a lot. However, a static setup never seems to be enough, as the development and testing needs are constantly changing. This lead me to think about what would be an ideal solution for the constantly-changing needs, and this is what I'd like to see going forward:

1. The solution should be able to provision new virtual machines on demand with the chosen setup. Ideally, this would be web portal where I could specify operating system version, edition and language, for instance an English Windows Server 2008 R2 machine or a Windows 7 Professional x64 in Finnish language. Then, the virtual machine would be built automatically, and an IP address would be shown or sent to me via e-mail within 15 minutes or so.

2. In addition to the basic operating system installation, it would be great to be able to specify which software configuration I need, especially in the development tools front. How many times have you manually installed Visual Studio 2010? I've done that already too many times, and this should be automated even though the installation is easy itself. It would also be great to be able to install other development tools,

3. I would need a web portal to view, start and stop, and connect using remote desktop (RDP) to the virtual machines running on my server. Since there's always a limitation of resources, be it memory, disk space or processor space, not everything can run at a time. (For the reference, my current virtualization box has 24 GB of RAM, which allows me to run around ten to twelve virtual machines at a time. So far, this has been enough, but I'm still looking forward to the SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 which brings better memory management to Hyper-V.)

4. Remote access should be everywhere. A Remote Desktop client for the Windows Phone 7 would be just great!

5. MSDN on a local disk. Although it takes less than an hour to download a DVD's worth of bits from MSDN, sometimes this is too much. It would be great to have enough hard disk space to have a local copy of all the MSDN bits, with automatic refresh of course as new titles become available. An "MSDN Sync", if you will. And the hardware needed should cost less than $200 ideally.

That would do it for me. What would be your ideal solution for the new decade?