vmware as sysadmins best friend

when doing something new like installing an addon to our most excellent nagios monitoring system i like to take notes. this is so that i can do it faster next time. i tend to take notes in a form that ends up getting turned into a script. if it's worth doing again, it's worth automating. one of the problems i've found in the past is that i don't get a change to test my script. sometimes a leave out a command. or perhaps at the end of solving a problem i decide that some of the things I did just weren't necessary. this is when virtualization and snapshots come in.

before making changes i take a snapshot of the virtual OS. in vmware server this is a simple mouseclick. then i get to work making my changes and writing my script/doc. when i have completed the task and am happy with my script i hit 'revert to snapshot' on vmware and it takes the OS back to the state it was in before i made the changes. now i can run my script, check it worked and repeat until i have automated the process i have spent the afternoon (or weekend!) trying to perfect.

thankyou vmware!