A virtual development environment (VDE) is an application development environment (ADE) set up on a virtual machine. By using virtual machines, you can work with more than one operating system (OS) without the need for a separate hardware for each OS. Oracle Solaris offers multiple options for setting up and configuring virtual environments. This document states how you can choose, set up, and configure the virtual environment. Because a virtual machine acts like a physical machine for the purposes of hosting an ADE, the process for setting up the ADE is the same for virtual or physical machines. This chapter provides guidelines for choosing, setting up, and configuring a virtual environment to host your ADE.