How to create a test environment for commercial Windows applications?
.net, installation, testing, windows
Solution
I am using VMWare, I liked linked clone feature that creates a temporary clone of certain configuration. VMWare supports more OSes. You can check "Comparison of platform virtual machines"
Problem
How do you best test commercial windows .NET applications on different environments? (XP, Vista, Win 7, Terminal server, Citrix) I was thinking of MS Virtual PC, together with some ghosting software like Acronis .. http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/ What are good, tested test setups ? :-) ....................................... Thanks to the help of volodi and lukas I've now come a bit further: It seems like VMWare Workstation is the perfect software solution for this problem. You can take snapshots of configurations, so we don't even need any imaging software anymore. Plus, it has a price of 189 $... sweet ... Now a few extra problems however we encountered : - In vmware, it is recommended you store your vm's on your LOCAL disk. Saving to a network or USB drive is possible, but you need PocketACE, and you'll have to store it first locally, then convert which seems cumbersome ... So we are thinking of buying a new laptop with 1TB Disk space. We would use this laptop solely for testing purposes. Where do you store your virtual machines ? -> Store it on a network drive or local disk... this was a misunderstanding ... - Now another problem seems backing up ... How you're gonna backup 500 GB of data ? That seems like a lot of work ... -> Well this was a misunderstanding. If you create a new machine, you have to allocate 40GB of space. So we thought, we need 8 machines, 8 x 40 = 320 GB ... This is wrong, a vm is +/- 3-6 GB ... The vm disk size seems to grow dynamically - Also, should i buy a 64-bit machine ? -> If you want to testCitrix XenServer, you will need a 64-bit processor ...