title: What is the best virtualization tool available?
body: <p>Recently my team has spent too many hours setting up machines with previous product releases or database servers with specific patches. In some cases, we have taken a developers machine down for up three days as a result. Clearly, this would be an ideal case for using a virtual machine. I am trying to champion the practice of making a virtual image of customer releases. I've used VMware effectively in the past for development and testing purposes, but I was wondering if anyone had any other virtualization tools they have had good experience using? </p>
  
  <p>We are doing development in Java on Windows XP machines.</p>