VMware Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages of using VMware for your Test/Dev Environment
• Cost effective use of hardware
• Large portions of your production environment can be replicated
on a few servers
• Lower cost of hardware for the entire test environment
• Faster rollback during testing
• Faster deployment of a new test platform
• Test VMs can be decommissioned and even deleted after they
are not needed
Disadvantages of using VMware for your Test/Dev Environment
• Requires that your staff have (or learn) some basic VMware
skills
• VMs are not good for load testing if your production environment
is completely physical
As you can see, the advantages of using VMware in your development
or test environment easily outweigh the disadvantages. On top
of that, the second disadvantage can be completely mitigate by simply
keeping an few pieces of hardware for load testing if you plan on
maintaining physical production servers.