That's a novel approach, but where does the IDE live, within the VM? Seems like performance would really suck with that setup, but perhaps I don't understand what all you have on the VM and what you have on the host OS.
At my company, we give developers several days (up to a week at times) to get everything downloaded, installed, setup, configured, etc. It's a huge drain but then again, you should've seen it 2-3 years ago, at which point the only avoidance of duplicated efforts was by virtue of having a single portable HD which held all of our databases [for use in testing]. The data was 5 years old at the time...
To just set everything up, several days to a week sounds extreme to me. The VM should hold the code, framework, db, etc.. It's basically a clone of the production environment that lives inside a VM on my host machine. It has a shared folder with my host machine which holds the code. I use an IDE on my local machine to edit this code, which the VM runs. No reason to put the IDE into the VM. This achieves perfect separation and has a total of a few hours setup time for most projects. Literally no duplication of efforts (except setting up the VM its self).
True. Many companies have come up with solutions for this problem, including VMs. But imagine having a VM for every project without the need to download or distribute them. That's what Cloud9 offers~
At my company, we give developers several days (up to a week at times) to get everything downloaded, installed, setup, configured, etc. It's a huge drain but then again, you should've seen it 2-3 years ago, at which point the only avoidance of duplicated efforts was by virtue of having a single portable HD which held all of our databases [for use in testing]. The data was 5 years old at the time...