Last night my local area network device fell over. I don’t know why, and haven’t looked into it yet. However as a consequence, one of my Windows virtual machines failed and my host Windows 7 box had to be forcibly reset as it wouldn’t shut down by itself even after being left for thirty minutes to do so.
This afternoon I needed to boot up a client virtual machine in order to do some work, but due to the unexpected hardware glitch, the Windows installation was corrupted.
A couple of years ago a technical issue like this would have have taken me at least half a day to resolve (from backups) or longer.
Today the whole issue “never happened” after 12 minutes of processing time 
16:40…. 
16:45…. 
16:52…. 
If you are a professional software developer, designer or creative producer, do you use Virtual Machines for your work? How do you protect your machines, work and environment?
Virtual machine hosted in Hyper-V under Windows Server 2008 R2 is the way to go for anyone who wants to do virtual. And it’s worth doing regular snapshots of the virtual machine to allow it to be restored to a good known point in time.
Preaching to the converted I know, but hey.
Well I am a Network/System Engineer and I use Virtual Machines. I started using Vmware 6 – 7 years ago.
The best thing that I like about VMs are that you can create snapshots within a few seconds and it takes a few seconds to restore them.
I usually create snapshots in this way.
1. Clean Windows Installation.
2. Clean Windows Installation w/ Windows Updates.
3. Software Installation – ABC
4. Software Installation – DEF
Thank you.