I am not very familiar with the world of virtualization, but want to explore the opportunities.
Most of our developers currently develop on their local machines; I want to see if this can be made a bit more streamlined and give everyone a virtual machine to work on. Each VM should be an exact copy of a 'base' VM and I should be able to easily create new VMs.
Apart from knowing some of the brands out there - VMware and Virtualbox being the ones I am most familiar with - , I really don't know enough to make a solid choice.
Requirements:
- 3-5 VM's. Should be pretty easy to create additional ones
- Cheap / free: preferable choice would be to install the VM software on our existing Windows 2008 server so that we can experiment with it before actually deploying a dedicated server for it.
- VMs only need to run a LAMP stack, no GUI. No need for massive amounts of CPU/RAM.
Questions:
- What would be the best choice considering these requirements?
- What platform do I need to host this? Is it possible to use our current server for this?