Che dire... concordo al 100%!!!
As an MSDN subscriber I'm the privileged owner off all software for development, one of these items is virtual server. The big brother of virtual PC, I have used VPC for more than a year now to test applications and setups. But VPC is not really made to support larger setups and so I tried virtual server. Well my first impression was "Why didn't I installed this yesterday ?", this tool is what every developer should have on it's workstation. It is really fast, and if I say fast I mean FAST, you don't even see that your working on a virtual machine.
Virtually every setup is possible, as a developer who takes his products serious I like to test as much as possible before I throw a new baby in production, and I see different possible setups with virtual server to help me. Let's say you want to test your new webapp for redundancy. I'm not going to build two servers from the gound up to kick one and see how my application reacts on that, no I will take an existing virtual disk, setup the virtual network and test the new webapp in virtual server. This will take about half an hour and the test is completely seperated from any network. With virtual server you could setup a complete copy of your production setup on your own workstation and test your applications there putting them into production without the cost of all that needless hardware. Just buy yourself a good dual processor workstation with a few gigs of memory and your done, tell your manager you need a workstation costing 4000 € instead of a complete copy of the production environment costing more than 100.000 €. And this setup leaves room in the budget for an Alienware notebook too, also very important.
Probably the best feature of virtual server is that every system has a virtual disk, if your host goes crazy, can't startup anymore or get's stolen (the last one actually did happen) then you will be up and running in no time, setup a new host, this takes about an hour or two, setup virtual server another 15 minutes and start your guest os, up and running in no time, and all software installed.
The only drawback I found in virtual server is that there is no possibility to put several virtual machines in fullscreen on a multiscreen setup, it would be nice to have 2 or 3 monitors with on each monitor a virtual machine. You could then switch from machine to machine with a shortkey like HostKey + 1 for machine1, Hostkey + 2 for machine2 and so on. If this will be in the next version I would be the happiest man on earth.
It looks like virtual server isn't only fun for It Pro people, if you are a serious developer take a look at Virtual Server Home for more information, and install it.