Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Anyone build nsopenssl for Win32

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Posted by John Sequeira on
I believe the administrative overhead you refer to largely doesn't exist when you use the VM expressly for a single purpose,  like openACS development.  You don't have to worry about software conflict or device conflicts because little if any will be added to a base developer system.  There's no security or user management because each VM is essentially a single user system (though there's no reason it couldn't be shared as a server).

Give everyone root if they want it -> the system you're duplicating and they're coding on is just a blob that sits on their hard drive.  They mess it up,  you send a new file their way and they're off and running.  It's a good idea to keep the source code they're working on backed up or versioned outside the VM (using Samba/NFS/CVS or sneakernet) for this eventuality,  but I've done this before on my last big ACS gig.  It's not a big deal.

We distributed VM's to the sales team for doing onsite demos and it worked fine after we did the initial setup.  I challenge you to find a less technical group to validate the VM approach.  😊