Hardware based "snapshot" functionality, like on VMWare

The way we are currently working when developing out software involves developing inside a vmware virtual machine running visual studio on windows xp. This is mainly due to the fact that our software installs many drivers and hooks different areas in the system, therefor debugging the entire system is the most convenient on the machine running the entire package. Due to certain limitations (the place where hooks are set, etc), remote debugging is out of the question, it just doesn't work.

This forces us with having the whole dev environment installed inside a virtual machine, develop and debug in the vm. As you can imagine, the performance is bad, and this is generally hell (performance wise).

What I would like to have is an ability similar to what I have with the snapshots mechanism in vmware: I can create a clean snapshot without the system installed, but with all the dev tools. Install a specific version of my software and work on bug fixes/features for it, compile and all working with the live system. When I need to install a different version I will go back to the snapshot I saved and do it all over again.

I could do this by creating 开发者_Go百科ghost images at various points and we already tried this approach. What I am looking for however is an alternative way to it. Something that would do the snapshot voodoo for me automatically, something that is easy to use, but not a vmware.. something to turn my live machine to a snapshotable one.

Hope this makes sense. Thanks in advance.