Giuseppe Maxia of Continuent and long time creator of MySQL Sandbox.
Only works on Unix-like servers. Works with MySQL, Percona & MariaDB servers. MySQL server has the data directory, the port and the socket – you can’t share these.
To use it: make_sandbox foo.tar.gz. Then just do ./use.
$SANDBOX_HOME is ~/sandboxes. You can also create ~/opt/mysql/ and if you have MySQL 5.0.91 binary in that directory, you can just do “sb 5.1.91”.
Sandbox has features to start replication systems as well. You can have varying master/slave setups with varying versions as well (good idea to test from MySQL -> MariaDB master->slave for migration).
You can now also play with tungsten-sandbox, which is a great way to start playing with Tungsten Replicator (see documentation and tungsten-toolbox). There is apparently also a MySQL Cluster sandbox tool that someone is working on.