Need
For all my software development projects, I now use one VirtualBox virtual machine per project. This allows me to isolate my development environment from the physical machine I'm using, not to mix several software environment configurations that could be potentially incompatible, and, when required, to easily provide a colleague with a perfect copy of my development environment.
A few days ago, another need appeared: to make available a demonstration based on a given version of a project. This time, the virtual machine would not run on a desktop PC, but on a server. And it should be kept running for weeks and possibly months.