I'm continually amazed that many development teams and enterprises do not use an artifact repository as a tool in their software development process.

An artifact repository is akin to what Subversion is to source code, i.e. it is a way of versioning code binary artifacts. In the Java world these artifacts could be jars, wars, ears, fully fledged applications, libraries or a collections of libraries that are packaged.

The first requirement is to make sure that you have "hardware-assisted visualization support" enabled in your bios. This is dependent on the hardware manufacturer, for example ASUS  calls this "secure virtual machine"

1. VMware Workstation can be downloaded from http://downloads.vmware.com/d/
The product can be evaluated for free for 30 days.
VMware-Workstation-Full-7.1.2-301548.x86_64.bundle

2. The install process is very easy and I installed mine on RHEL 5.5 64 bit

In the past I used a QNAP for my ISCSI and NAS needs. It did a pretty good job and I can't complain.
Like any inquisitive engineer I went the next step and built my own from a cheap PC. My first home made NAS was using FreeNAS and in general I was more that happy. It has a lots of features, obvious stuff like NFS, Samba, ISCSI but for the me the coolest was the inclusion of Fuppes for media streaming to PC's, Xbox and PS3 and yes I have all three!

So what does the world of IT as Service and software development look like when they collide? So there are some obvious synergies. Software development over the many years has been moving to a model to deliver business value quicker in an ever expedited world of business where requirements change at a fast pace and hence Agile, Scrum, XP and LEAN etc. have gained popularity Cloud computing, the promise and the tool I believe can deliver some of that Here is some of what I think Cloud computing brings to the table.