Yeah we all know Virtual Machines rocks.  Jeff Atwood over at codinghorror.com just moved hosting providers and hardware, and it was the easiest move he’s ever done.  It was as simple as:  shut down the VM | compacted and compressed it | transferred it to the new server | booted it up again | Change IP Address

If your not already reading his blog, you can check out his full post "Virtual Machine Server Hosting", and a snippet is below:

All I had to do was change the IP address in the VM and I was up and running as if nothing had changed. That’s the easiest server migration I’ve ever experienced, all thanks to virtualization.

Phil and I are both Windows ecosystem developers, so we went with what we knew. But virtualization provides total flexibility. I could spin up a new Linux server at a moment’s notice if I decided to switch this blog over to the LAMP stack. Or I could play with the latest release candidate of Windows Server 2008. And they can all run in parallel, assuming we have enough memory. That’s what I love most about virtualization– the freedom.

Although Phil and I share admin access to the host machine, we have our own private playgrounds in our virtual servers. We’re completely isolated from each other’s peculiarities and weirdnesses: nothing we do (well, almost nothing) can affect the other person’s virtual machine. Reboot? No problem. Install some stupid software I can’t stand? Go for it. Format the drive and start over? Don’t care. It’s your machine. Do whatever.