As a developer, you most likely need to work with all types of systems: Windows, Linux, Solaris, and so on. Perhaps you even need to work with DOS, NetWare, or other legacy operating systems. Even if you develop in a homogenous environment, perhaps you need to test network code, where your application is distributed across multiple machines. It may be costly or inconvenient to maintain a separate physical web server, application server, and database server per developer. Virtualization can help tremendously here, and it doesn't have to be expensive, heavyweight, or difficult to use.

In this article, I describe VirtualBox open source virtualization software that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and OpenSolaris. On any of these platforms, you can run Windows, Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris, BSD Unix, QNX, OS/2, and even MS-DOS guest virtual machines. There's support for fast startup and shutdown of virtual machines, access to hardware-based graphics acceleration, true multicore support as well as multiprocessor emulation, integration of system taskbars, seamless operation (where windows of multiple OS's appear together on the host machine), 64-bit and 32-bit host/guest support, and various networking options.

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