Best practice for a build environment?

[schmidt4hire]

We run our build machine in a VMware virtual machine from day one. We can move the VM from one piece of physical hardware to another without losing the normal three days of setup time. VMware allows you to save 'snapshots' of your VM along the way, so it is pretty painless to setup.

We've been able to move our build machine from a Celeron-800 to a P4-2GHz in about 10 minutes (the time it takes to install VMware on the new box, plus copy the 2GB VM).

VMware runs pretty close to native speed, especially for building
source code (where you're not doing much graphics on the screen).

Of course, the downside to this approach is that if you ever do need to rebuild the environment from scratch, it is still a manual
process.

-- Doug