Virtualization is one of the newest and fastest growing segments of IT. It allows you to run a whole new operating system or server on your machine that is completely seperate from your workstation. It lives in its own little virtual world. If you plan on doing a decent amount of editing to your WordPress blog, having a dedicated development environment is a good idea and virtualization can help.
Note: do not under any circumstances use this tutorial to set up a live public facing server. These instructions do not set up the proper security and are for local development only!
With this dev area, you’re free to make changes or create a new blog, theme or just mess around with the inner workings of WordPress without having to worry about setting up a new site on your host account or screwing up your existing site. There are many tutorials out there that show you how to install and run WordPress locally on your Windows, Mac or Linux computer. My personal preference is to run a virtual linux server on my iMac. Why? Well there are a few reasons:
1) I don’t have to mess with my operating system and make changes that can possibly affect other software on my machine.
2) It’s closer to the real hosting environment that your blog lives on.
3) If I make a change to the virtual server to test something and screw it up, I can just delete my old virtual machine and run a clean backup that’s good as new in seconds.
There are quite a few programs out there that can run virtual machines on your workstation. My preference is VMware Fusion (not free), but there are other options you can use with any operating system that range from free to not free (here’s a couple).
VMware server edition – Windows – free
Virtualbox – Windows, Linux, Mac – free
Parallels – Windows, Linux, Mac – not free
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