MS Virtual PC

[M_Six]

I don't know if MS bought VMWare or just stole the design, but Virtual PC works pretty well. Here's my desktop with XP running in the background on the host machine with Windows Server 2003 running in one Virtual PC window and Fedora running in another.



Link to full-size pic.

[willy_ph]

Does Virtual PC require a pretty hefty machine to run multiple OS's?

[PresterJohn]

VMware was acquired by emc2 several months ago.

i have a copy of ms virtual pc but really don't have much interest using it at the moment. AFAIK, MS is not positioning this product as a true virtual machine product...it is really aimed at the desktop market. in any event, i have an entire VM infrastucture encapsulated using gsx server...way too much trouble to duplicate this using virtual pc and not even sure it supports that many VM's anyway. then there's the whole question of how stable the product is for robust deployment since this is MS first release since buying out Connectix....

[M_Six]

It does take a bit of horsepower to run several OS simultaneously. I have 1GB of RAM in my machine and I dedicated 256MB to each guest OS. As far as stability goes, I haven't used it enough to see. But I was at an MS seminar a few months ago (that's where I got this), and the speaker had 2 versions of XP and one 2003 Server running at the same time. He had 2GB of RAM in his machine, though. Still, he had no problems jumping back and forth. MS touts this as a good way to test out new patches and software on various OSs without the need to have multiple machines. I want to try a remote file sharing product for Exchange 5.5, but I really don't want to just install it on my production Exchange box without testing it. This will give me a chance to try it elsewhere first.

I use VMware for development work, but several of the beta testers with the SkyOS project have posted postive feedback for MS Virtual PC.

For anyone that is interested, a free 45-day full trial version of VPC can be downloaded here....

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/

Robert Richmond

played with Virtual pc at work and wasnt really too impressed with it to be honest. Seemed kind of slow

ill stick with vmware.

[M_Six]

It's considerably less expensive than VMWare, too. If I remember correctly, VMWare was over $300 for the Windows version.

[DanGrease]

I've tried Virtual PC once and it works pretty well. Nice screenshot!
PS. Never tried VMWare

dan

[PresterJohn]

Originally posted by M_Six
MS touts this as a good way to test out new patches and software on various OSs without the need to have multiple machines. I want to try a remote file sharing product for Exchange 5.5, but I really don't want to just install it on my production Exchange box without testing it.

yes, this is pretty much how MS is marketing the product from what i've seen in the press releases, ie. run several VM's for testing, etc.

aside from this, MS has been very leery of stating what the future of the product will be...ie. will they ever release a more powerful version of virtual pc for large scale or enterprise deployment? spectulation is that they will be using the VM technology and folding it into a future OS release and just staying with virtual pc as a niche product for the 'desktop'.

curious can you ghost to the virtual pc machine?