I have to work for a few weeks on a Windows 7 machine and I need to use it to ho
ID: 656546 • Letter: I
Question
I have to work for a few weeks on a Windows 7 machine and I need to use it to host developer virtual machine containing SharePoint 2013 and Visual Studio 2012.
Since the virtual machine serves a lot for experimentation, it is crucial to have some form of snapshots.
Since there is no Hyper-V on Windows 7, I considered two options:
VMWare Player. I used it for a week and found it quite terrible. Performance looks poor (although, I don't have benchmarks to support that), there are a lot of BSODs, and, more importantly, there are no support for snapshots. The only way to keep successive states of a machine is to manually copy the files, which takes approximately an hour
Explanation / Answer
I can suggest you try VirtualBox. I've used it for personal purposes for years without much trouble at all, while not for Sharepoint at least it may merit a try.
Open source (GPLv2)
Multiplatform (at least supports Windows, Linux and Mac hosts)
Does support snapshots natively.
Also other features like many virtual disk formats, hardware virtualization for guests, USB support, networking, sound and fine control of hardware resources available.