"Blowing away a computer and installing a different operating system is all part of a day's work for the Test Center. In fact, some projects in the Test Center over the past year have included a lot of time spent simply installing and reinstalling various Linux distributions on a single machine.
"Test Center staff have found a number of good reasons for removing a Linux distro entirely and doing a clean install. For testing and evaluation purposes, however, it's helpful to have multiple systems available simultaneously for comparison. This is where virtual machines really come in handy..."