Book excerpt: Developing software and testing within virtual machines provides you with countless advantages in terms of automation, stability, disaster recovery, and overall code quality. With this book as your guide, you get the tools you need to create a fleet of virtual machine images that you can use to build your own secure applications. Beginning with the basics of virtualization and its place within the development and testing environment, the book then delves into the APIs and provides a deep, example-rich reference to their function and purpose. VMware expert Eric Hammersley shares his vast experience in using VMware in the development process and shows you how you can streamline your own development with the new VMware Server. You'll learn to integrate VMware Server into your existing environment using CruiseControl.NET and Visual Studio® Team System as examples. Plus, you'll get a clear understanding of virtual hardware, networks, and the server console, and find out how to build base images. You'll discover the benefits of software development and testing within virtual machines and the advantages they have to offer. This will help you rapidly deploy new machines, set up multiple platforms on a single machine, and dramatically increase the utilization of your hardware. What you will learn from this book Steps on how to install and configure VMware Server Tips to follow when creating development base images Methods on how to organize your image libraries and prepare them for use Best practices for using VmCOM, VmPerl, and the Programming API How to integrate VMware Server into your existing environment and automate its functionality Ways to leverage VMware Server to provide banks of testing machines on demand Who this book is for This book is for software developers, lead developers, and software testing engineers who want to integrate VMware Server into their existing systems in order to create and test applications on various platforms. Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.