After the last OpenExpo in Winterthur, Switzerland I decided to take a deeper look at FreeBSD. What impressed me most was the jail mecanism that makes it very easy to setup isolated environments on a single machine.
I currently mostly use Linux (Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS) on my servers, but I always thought FreeBSD is worth a look as well. And from what I can tell so far It definitely was!
After experimenting a bit with jails I stumbled upon ezjail a tool that aims to make it easier to create and maintain FreeBSD jails. And it really does a good job. I found a good introduction to ezjail here.
Jails make it really simple to give all the people in my team an isolated UNIX environment on a single machine where they can experiment without compromising the production environment and/or each other. Because if something goes wrong you just delete the jail and recreate it from a backup.
So if you are planning to setup a server, give FreeBSD a try!