> Unlike dayglowred, I'm pretty much a Linux guy.
Actually, I'm overall more of an *IX guy than anything else, with a slight preference for BSD, and work very happily in Linux (Ubuntu and CentOS mostly) all day long.
My current preference for OS X as my home "on the metal" base OS is that it allows me to run EVERYTHING else in VMs if I wish. If I had any other hardware, I wouldn't be able to run OS X when I need to, and I find Apple hardware quite reliable and long-lasting.
The drawback of using OS X is, of course, that it's a walled garden -- you do things Apple's way, or the highway. But I mainly use OS X for mail, browsing, iTunes to manage device content, and to host all my various VMs, so it doesn't get in my way at all. Time Machine is a great, painless backup program.
Having VMs of everything gives me the widest possible OS and application palette, and being largely OS-agnostic by nature, that works best for me.
As with so much else in computing, YMMV...
Having VMs of everything gives me the widest possible OS and application palette, and being largely OS-agnostic by nature, that works best for me.
While the following doesn't directly speak to that, I thought you might be interested...
I do a lot of stuff with DNS these days. My main job is supporting the DNS infrastructure at a company that has deployed Bluecat DNS appliances. Recently we finally got permission to finally purchase some VMs of the appliances so I could build a local virtual lab.
OMG, it's so sweet to finally be able to actually really mess with the appliances without having to worry about toasting a production environment. Right now, I've got 4 appliances (1 admin/database, and 3 DNS servers) running under vmware set up in a little segregated LAN segment. Thankfully, I've got tons of ram on my main workstation. I've been able to set up all my home-grown support scripts to make this little environment almost perfectly mirror what I have deployed into the field. It's pretty cool kicking off a script to run twenty to thirty thousand queries that represent just about every record we have deployed and see that run in just a few minutes. Given network delays and whatnot, doing the same in my production environment takes quite a bit longer than what is essentially local queries, as all the network connectivity is just bouncing around the same box.
When I first started using vmware, I was of the opinion that it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I've come to qualify that a bit, as we have seen some pretty serious issues in production ESX environments that require really low latency (think network appliances for example), but for lab work, there really is no comparison. It's even better than a physical lab IMO, as I can toast and restore a VM faster than I ever could a physical box.
Which annoys me on principle. Apple strong-arms VMWare and the other VM guys into not allowing OSX to virtualize on other environments and they end up benefiting from it, as in your case, when I would have preferred that to come out as a loss for them. This annoys me (plus I don't really like having to use their UI on the host).