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    I would say, you are trying to solve several problems at once. Start with trying to solve the most important problem. Reproducible builds. Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 4:34
  • another thing - VM's cant tell when they are running on different machines, sometimes the VM software tracks that though so it can update the MAC addresses on the virtual LAN adapters. Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 4:36
  • @sylvanaar: A build server addresses the reproducible builds. However this is more than cumbersome while debugging / normal development. Mainly because to run / test the code it must be burned onto the target. Regarding the VM: I was not implying that the VM software tracks the machine it was on. That would be going against what it was designed for. However Windows XP in particular monitors for certain hardware changes to determine if it needs to be re-activated. This can also be seen when running Parallels 6 on OS X 10.6 and using an existing Win 7 bootcamp. It requires a 2nd activation. Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 5:11
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    I think the activate issue is more of an issue with that particular VM implementation, we have never had any issues with VMWare. Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 5:56
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    @Adam - I have mostly used Windows XP in virtual development machines, the lower memory and boot drive footprint makes for more compact VM's. 512MB memory & 20GB boot drive is more than enough for a VS2008 development environment. It's also nice being able to clone a machine by copying it and then running newsid to allow both VMs to coexist on the same domain. Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 13:13