[k3n]

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...

[lopatin]

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).