This is the first part in what will be an ongoing set of articles on setting up and getting ready to do development. Before one begins to do any sort of development there needs to be somewhere to do it. With the advent of modern computers and the amazing amount of horsepower that they now contain virtualization makes a great way to set up a perfect, portable environment that gives a developer an incredible amount of control over their work environment.
There are many different virtualization options available now that processors support virtualization directly on the hardware and the aforementioned abundance of computing power. Linux and Windows users can choose from qemu, KVM, VirtualBox, VMware Player/Workstation/Server, Parallels and Xen (Windows misses out on KVM and Xen).
Out of that list, VMware has been in the virtualization business for a long time and as a result have wonderfully robust codebases for virtualization. It is because of this I will be setting up VMware Server, a free-as-in-beer product that allows a user to create virtual machines. The added benefit is that the end user can easily move this VM from machine to machine and even between VMware products.
