From some one who spent to many years crawling around bombers on a flight line, I assure you, there is always a “CAN” aircraft on the ramp. One specifically used to cannibalize parts from when in a hurry. Think of it as spare memory or hard drive during the war room. It will be pulled completely apart and you think it will be scraped.... Then when it's phase inspection is due, they will put it back together and fly it. Feel for the sap that signed off on that plugs Red X. He just hit the EPO!

Thats true! For myself and my personal bad habits of neglecting to backup my system. My little cloud app of 100GB has saved me more then once. The last time I tried to be stupid and go from stable to testing I ended with a brand new install. I even dumped the home folder, everything I needed was safely tucked away in a spider web on the cloud.

You may want to re-look at the clouds, for around $500 a year you can really have a nice lab, spin up and down systems till your heart is content. The big issue is you need to be aware of your usage. Power off systems your not playing with. It is a play ground, don't leave them running just because. Virtual Box is a great idea if you want to buy a new box. but you will spend more in two years on that PC, 4core minimum and 16GB of ram, (my minimum) and power, then you will renting a little slice of a cloud. It's computing in a new way, and need to be looked at differently. Plus you have easy access to it from anywhere.

I particularly like the part about support, "support when needed" Microsoft providing the resources where needed. I still get my MS support same place I get my Open Office support "google". My IT budget isn't big enough to pay a Microsoft employee to search tech net. Then tell me it will be fixed with the next service release.