We use VMWare extensively in our development and test areas. Our production server is still physical hardware with Linux RedHat OS on it. Our Preproduction Test environment is also physical hardware so that it can mimic production better, but all of our other machines are VMs. For development the VMs are Windows based. Our Integration and Demo environments are VMs with Linux. For development, using the VMs has greatly improved our productivity. We have VMs that are used for automated nightly builds of new code. With Windchill installed on its own drive in the VMs, the build process just copies the newly built drive to a file share where our developers can copy it and just swap it into their development VMs and poof! you have a brand new Windchill installation with all code compiled and all load files loaded. With the test and demonstration environments, once we had one installed and configured on one, our sys admin just cloned it to make the next environment. We then "rehosted" and we were up and running with a new installation. Using VMware to "reset" back to a snapshot works as well. The nightly build does that following the build and copy. Once the new drive has been copied to the share, the build command reverts the VM back to a snapshot that is a plain ootb installation of Windchill. As for the stability of VMware, we've been pretty successful using it. I occasionally have trouble with the Anti-Virus scan on my laptop causing my development VM to hang.
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