As developer testing your software on different system configurations and versions of operating systems is a good way to improve quality of your application. But how would you do it?
Installing multiple operating systems on your computer might solve the issue but you won’t like it. It will cut your hard drive into multiple partitions and eat free space from the partition used by your primary system. Also managing such setup is not easy. Easy OS will update differently. You will need to install required applications as many times as many operating systems you will install.
In addition this will become more difficult if your software depends on another product. Which of course has also different versions and does not offer portable deployment. What than?
Fortunately Virtual Machines has been invented. However managing them in efficient way might be very tricky.
This article will describe my current setup of virtual machines in VirtualBox and best practices which I have came with.