SAP recently approved the use of some virtualization technologies for production deployment (See note 1122387). When I needed to reinstall Composition Environment 7.1 SP3 and the Enterprise Services Repository, I decided to try using a VMware image. It's great!
I installed CE into a Windows XP image. I set the image to have 1.5G of RAM, which is less than the recommended 2G for CE. I have a total of 3G on my machine, but I didn't want to give any more RAM to the image. I also installed the ESR. I installed NetWeaver Developer Studio on my local hard drive, not in the image, because I want to make sure that any projects and code that I create are backed up when I back up my local machine.
The performance has been more than adequate. In fact, the only difference that I've noticed is about a 20% increase in the time it takes to start the app server, and the first time a page is requested from the app server it takes a bit longer to get the response than when I was running CE locally.
Since I'm constantly trying out new versions of SAP products, the VM image is a great way to keep my machine cleaner. I'm thinking that next I might get one of the Linux virtual appliances from the VMware site and install CE into it. I'm betting that Linux can outperform Windows.
