What Virtual Machine software do people use?

In an effort to make some of my development efforts simpler, I'm thinking about spinning up VMs when I need a new environment to develop against. The hope is that it will shield me from things like I've been experiencing where a Windows Component got corrupted, resulting me in having to uninstall a number of things, restore the component, then spend a day re-installing the stuff I had to uninstall.

It doesn't have to be much. I would just need to run Windows 7 (yeah, I know it's archaic, but it's stable and what we use) running SQL Server - actually I might be able to run that off the host machine - Visual Studio and IIS. It would be nice if I could simply set up a base VM, clone it when I need to and then simply re-configure it for a new environment.

It's been a long time since I've used a VM.

-tg

If you're using a recent version of Windows Professional then I don't really see a reason not to use Hyper-V. Otherwise the other one that I've used most recently without any issues was VirtualBox.

I setup a domain to use with a set of server and workstation using Hyper-V. I'm using Windows10 pro as my local machine OS and have Server 2012R2 for most of my server and a combination of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 as clients in the domain, I just start the ones I want

I use the Windows VM on my Win 7 machine... Win 7 Pro allows you to get a free copy of XP. (or it did a few years back) I managed to copy my XP VM's and for my needs it's plenty.

VirtualBox is also very good. I installed it and Win 7 on my new Win 10 machine...

I used to use VirtualBox a lot. Work paid for a VMWare license, and I found it to be better enough to warrant the expense, but VirtualBox is fine. I don't use it as much anymore because I don't have access to MSDN Universal so I don't have Windows licenses to toss around, and I don't have a machine with 64GB of RAM anymore.

Perhaps not entirely relevant to this thread, but speaking as a hobbyist, I sometimes played with old programming languages (((Q)basic) Basic and Pascal) in Dosbox and iAltair (an Altair emulator by Peter Schorn). Playing with C++ and the like in Linux (under VirtualBox) can also be fun. :-)

I use Toolwiz Time Freeze 2017 on my Windwos 10 Laptop. It's free and works great - I never had a problem with it.

I'm curious how those without MSDN deal with Windows licensing?

Yeah i use Hyper-V, also.

At my last place all testing was done on a Hyper-V VM farm were we could just spin up instances of all our supported environments and then roll them back again at the end of the testing. That was really really great, unfortunately they dont yet do that where i am now but it looks likes they want to move towards that model.

For Dev purposes i have a couple of VM's currently which i use and they are really useful if i want to spin up a web service or test something myself on a clean machine.