In comments on my entry on some VM mistakes I made, people suggested setting up template VM images that I would clone or copy to create live images. With that, every time I wanted a new VM I'd at least have a chance to think about its settings and if cloning was easy enough I'd avoid the temptation to reuse an existing VM for some theoretically quick (and not very important) test.

As it happens I've sort of started to toy with this idea but I think there's a practical roadblock in our environment: OS package updates. Most of the actual machines that I deal with (and thus most of the test images I build) are not frozen at a point in time but instead are continuously kept up to date with Ubuntu's package updates. If I have base starter images I need to either keep those base starter images up to date or immediately apply all of the pending updates after I clone the base image to make a new working VM. Neither of those options seem entirely attractive, although I should probably give it a real try just to see.

(There is also the subtle issue that cloning a preconfigured base image and then updating the packages is not quite the same thing as a from-scratch rebuild. If I want to be absolutely sure that a machine can be rebuilt from scratch, I'm not sure I trust anything short of a from-scratch build. But I could probably save a bunch of time by doing the preliminary build testing with cloned images and only doing a from-scratch reinstall in the final test run.)

PS: every so often we make a meaningful change to the base install scripts and system; such changes would force me to rebuild all of the preconfigured images (well, strongly push me towards doing so). But I suppose those are relatively rare changes so I'm kind of making excuses to not try this.

(Which argues that I should try it, if only to understand what I really don't like about the idea instead of what I tell myself my concerns are. Yes, I'm sort of using my blog to talk out loud to myself.)

Sidebar: if you're working on VMs, give yourself more disk space

One of the smartest things I did recently for encouraging this sort of playing around with VMs is that I threw a third drive into my office workstation (to go along with the main mirrored system disks). Honestly, I should have done this ages ago; having to worry about how much disk space I had to spare for VMs is for the birds when 500 GB SATA drives are basically popcorn.

(The drive is unmirrored and un-backed-up, but if it dies I'll just lose expendable VM images and related bits and pieces. I keep the important VMs on my mirrored drives.)