Bogdan Albei has a new post today looking at a development environment he's set up and considers one of the "perfect" ways to do it - a virtualized environment that lets you test in your deployment environment despite what OS you currently run.

he environment has three basic elements: the operating system, the text editor and the test environment. The operating system is not really important as long as you're used to it, and this also applies to the text editor. [...] Unfortunately a lot of organisations have rules over rules that stop you from having your perfect environment. [...] How are you supposed to have a PHP test environment under Windows/MaxOS that is similar to your production Linux? The answer is quite simple: virtualisation.

He suggests using VMware to create a virtual environment (or multiple environments) for your development. They can even potentially share a folder on the drive so you can test the same code in multiple environments. He also includes a step-by-step guide that'll have you up and running in no time. Obviously, you'll need a copy of your OS of choice to install from once the VMware instance is all set up.

Alex Netkachov has posted a new tutorial to his blog today about installing a custom LAMP setup (Linux - Debian, to be exact, Apache, MySQL and PHP) inside of a virtual machine.

Installing Linux is not a complex task, you only need to follow some instructions and have basic understanding of how computer software and hardware work. Also you should be ready that documentation will be different from what you already might have seen. It means that it may be less colorful, more technical, and have different terminology. That's Ok. What you need is only to follow the doc and try to understand it - like thousands of people.

Most of the post is taken up with installing the Debian instance inside of a virtual instance (he mentions three, they're all about the same - VirtualBox, VMWare Server and VirtualPC) and includes a slideshow of images to help you through the install process. Once its installed, its just a simple matter of a few apt-get commands and you'll have MySQL and PHP setup to work with the already-installed Apache instance.

On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico Cargnelutti shares some quick steps for setting up a virtual appliance on your system for "LAMP development made easy".

In this article I will show you why the LAMP platform has become the platform of choice for the development and deployment of high performance Web applications. To get a LAMP development environment fired up without the hassles of configuring everything from scratch you only need one thing, a Virtual Appliance.

He explains what the virtual appliance is and show the three step (really just two) process to getting things all set up and working with a complete Ubunutu, Taskel and Zend Framework installation layered on top of your OS now.