<p>I develop exclusively on VMs. I currently run Boot Camp on a MacBook Pro and do all my development on a series of Virtual PC VMs for many different environments. This <a href="http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/UseVirtualPCsDifferencingDisksToYourAdvantage.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">post by Andrew Connell</a> litterally changed the way I work.</p>

<p>I'm thinking about switching to Fusion and running everything in OS X but I wasn't able to answer the following questions about VM Fusion/Workstation/Server. <strong>I need to know if the following features from Virtual PC/Server exist in their VMWare counter parts.</strong></p>

<ol>
<li>Differencing Disks (ability to create a Base VM and provision new VMs which just add deltas on top of the base [saves a ton of disk space, and makes it easy to spin up new VMs with a base set of funcitonality]). <em>(Not available with Fusion, need Workstation [$189])</em></li>
<li>Undo disks (ability to rollback all changes to the VM within a session). <em>(Available in both Workstation and Fusion [$189/$79.99 respectively])</em></li>
<li>Easily NAT out a different subnet for the VM to sit in. <em>(In both Fusion/Workstation).</em></li>
<li>Share VMs between VM Player and VM Server. I'd like to build up a VM locally (on OS X/Fusion) and then move it to some server (Win2k3/Win2k8 and VM Server) and host it there but with VM Server. <em>(In both Fusion/Workstation).</em></li>
<li>An equivalent to Hyper-V. <em>(Both Fusion and Workstation take advantage of type-2 hypervisor a for 64x VMs, neither do for 32 bit VMs. VMWare claims they're no slower as a result some <a href="http://www.thehypervisor.com/?p=57" rel="nofollow noreferrer">benchmarks corroborate this assertion</a>).</em></li>
<li>Ability to Share disks between multiple VMs. If I have a bunch of databases on a virtual disk and want them to appear on more than one VM I should be able to just attach them. <em>(Available in both Fusion and Workstation)</em></li>
<li>(Nice to have) Support for multiple processors assigned to a VM <em>(Available in both Fusion and Workstation).</em></li>
</ol>

<p><strong>Is there a VMWare guru out there who knows for sure that the above features are available on the other side?</strong> </p>

<p><strong>Also the above has been free (as long as you have licenses for Windows machines), besides buying Fusion are there any other costs?</strong></p>

<p><strong>The end result of my research, thanks so much!</strong>
<em>You can only create Linked clones and Full Clones (which are close to differencing disks) in VMWare Workstation (not Fusion). Workstation also has at better snapshot management in addition to other features which are difficult to enumerate. That being said Workstation is $189 (as opposed to $79) and not available on OS X. In addition Fusion 1.1 (current release) has a bunch of display bugs on OS X 10.5 (works well on 10.4). These will be remedied in Fusion 2.0 which is currently in (RC1). I'll probably wait until v2.0 comes out and then use both Workstation/Fusion to provision and use these VMs on OS X.</em></p>

[{'answer_id': 61773, 'author': 'Community', 'author_id': -1, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/-1', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>My first comment would be to avoid using JavaScript to change the angle brackets. Bypassing this is as simple as disabling JavaScript in the browser. Almost all server-side languages have some utility method that converts some HTML characters into their entity counterparts. For instance, PHP uses htmlentities(), and I am sure .NET has an equivalent utility method. In the least, you can do a regex replace for angle brackets, parenthesis and double quotes, and that will get you a long way toward a secure solution.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 61777, 'author': 'Kibbee', 'author_id': 1862, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1862', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>There\'s actually a way to turn that "feature" off. This will allow the user to post whichever characters they want, and there will be no need to convert characters to an alias using Javascript.  See this article for <a href="http://mdid.org/mdidwiki/index.php?title=Disabling_Request_Validation" rel="nofollow noreferrer">disabling request validation</a>.  It means that you\'ll have to do your own validation, but from the sounds of your post, it seems that is what you are looking to do anyway.  You can also disable it per page  by following <a href="http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/request-validation/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the instructions here</a>.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 61778, 'author': 'Tyler', 'author_id': 5642, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5642', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>I think the safest way to go is to NOT allow the user to create  tags with your WISYWIG. Maybe using something like a markdown editor like on this site or <a href="http://wmd-editor.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">available here.</a> would be another approach. </p>\n\n<p>Also keep the Page directive ValidateRequest=true which should stop  markup from being sent in the request, you\'ll of course need to handle this error when it comes up. People will always be able to inject  tags into the request either way using firefox extensions like <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/966" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Tamper data</a>, but the ValidateRequest=true should at least stop ASP.NET from accepting them.</p>\n\n<p>A straight forward post on XSS attacks was recently made by Jeff here. It also speaks to making your cookies HttpOnly, which is a semi-defense against cookie theft. Good luck!</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/61775', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/5642/']