Does anyone have recommendations on the best way to set up development and testing environments for Microsoft CRM 2011 On Demand?
The recommendations I have seen so far include:
You will need to be a little more specific. What's wrong with the 3 you have listed? Is it cost, it is the time to configure?
That being said, what I do is sign up for the free 30 day trial.
First, sign up for a new Windows Live account.
Second, click here to sign up for the 30 day account.
Third, I always write down the login & url because I always forget them.
I'll have anywhere from 1 - 5 of these running at once.
The main benefit is the control this gives me. Since you can't access the SQL server directly with On Demand, it forces you to make your configurations & customizations the correct way.
Your other option is to setup a VM environment and create a new instance every time you need a clean setup. This is not my preferred option since you need good hardware to run the environment (otherwise the performance penalty is huge)