production and test core

[coley]

Devs,
What do you currently do when you want to swap in and out a core machine, or even just test new features?
I've been out of my house since end last year and am now in the process of moving back and plan to have obviously a dedicated core, possibly bump of the RAM in it and use it as a build server - but then to be able to do some dev, I want to be one of those Indians Thom mentions .
I don't want whoever is watching/listening to Media to have to suffer reloads of the router or worse still me taking the routing down if others a browsing through lmce gateway or using voip.
do you use subnets? or VMs
what are the recommendations?

thanks
-Coley.

[merkur2k]

I use VMs (specifically virtualbox). The convenience factor of being able to make snapshots and clone hard drives so easily makes it a great choice compared to physical hardware.
I also do all my builds on my existing core, which has 2 gig of ram.