Moving to a Virtualized Environment

After you make the decision to move to a virtualized environment, most of what you need to do is essentially identical to the standard migration tasks that you'll need to perform for any system migration.

System installation, application migration, user configuration setup-all these tasks are identical under virtual environment to what you would normally do for a nonvirtual environment.

The biggest benefit comes when you get to deploying more than one instance of the same virtualized environment. Using the "create once, run many" concept, you can create a standard virtual machine, configure it, and copy the ready-to-go virtual machine definition to every desk that needs it.

As an alternative, if you are going to use more than one VM instance on a single system, you can create a common "base" instance and then alter it as needed for each environment you are running.