Simulate running Magento in future date

I'm working with an enterprise client right now that makes use of the Catalog Events features in Magento. For those not familiar, that means that they have product categories that are only available to customers between specific dates.

I am working on providing a good staging/testing environment for them, which grabs (and anonymizes) all the site data daily to give them an up-to-date playground. One of the things that I want to do as part of this is to allow them to fast-forward to a future date and see what the site will look like on that date (sales, events, holiday designs, etc).

Does anyone know of a c开发者_如何学Clean way to fool Magento into running everything as if we are currently on some other date? I don't think that changing server time is a well-extensible solution (there are multiple folks testing on this machine, plus that reeks of a hack), so the optimal answer would even be localizable to a particular user session.

Have you considered virtualization for this. I routinely try and use it for testing and even dev environments. Yes, changing server time is a hack but in a VM that is trivial and you can control what you need, rollback state, etc. I know it is not quite what you have been thinking of; as elegant, etc., but it may meet your clients needs.

There are a lot of VM options (VMWare, VirtualBox, Parallels). If you are more enterprise focused then ESX or ESXi (if you don't have a big budget). Also HyperV if you are a MS shop or XenServer.