October 20th, 2009

Windows XP Mode Q and A

Posted by Ed Bott @ 10:52 am

Categories: Virtualization, Windows 7

Tags: Virtualization, PC, Windows Virtual PC, Windows Virtual PC 2007, Windows XP Virtual Hard Drive, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows 7, Operating Systems, Software

In comments and private e-mails, I’ve received a surprising number of questions about Windows XP Mode, a new feature in Windows 7 that I demoed in today’s screencast (Windows 7 in action: A closer look at Windows XP Mode). Rather than distribute my answers in various comment threads, I decided to consolidate them here.

What is Windows XP Mode?

This feature, available in Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate, and Enterprise, provides a licensed copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 3 in Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) format. When installed with the proper integration components, it allows you to run Windows XP in its own virtual machine, separate from the host Windows 7 installation. You can attach USB devices to the virtual Windows XP machine, play sounds, and access drives on the host PC. You can access the Internet, but connections from the Windows XP virtual machine to the local area network are disabled by default.

How much does it cost?

Nothing, as long as you’re running a supported edition of Windows 7.

What’s the difference between Windows Virtual PC, Windows XP Mode, Windows Virtual PC 2007, Hyper-V, and MED-V?  Read the rest of this entry »

May 19th, 2008

Microsoft releases Virtual PC 2007 SP1

Posted by Ed Bott @ 12:36 pm

Categories: Virtualization

Tags: Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Corp., VM, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Operating Systems, Software, Ed Bott

Via Microsoft’s Ben Armstrong, I learned last week that Microsoft has released Virtual PC 2007 Service Pack 1 (x86 and x64 packages are available for download, and release notes are also online now).

The new package supports Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3 as host and guest, and also supports Windows Server 2008 Standard as a guest OS.

In the past, I’ve been underwhelmed with Virtual PC, mostly for its sluggish performance. Lately, I’ve been using the beta of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008, which I described last month). So, in the spirit of giving the new release a fair try, over the weekend I installed Virtual PC 2007 SP1 on two different quad-core Intel machines running x86 and x64 versions of Windows Vista Ultimate. I was very pleasantly surprised. In under two hours, I set up VMs running Windows XP SP3 and Vista Home Basic SP1. Previously, Vista installs in a VM had been agonizingly slow. This time, installation was completed in about 45 minutes, which is only slightly 10 minutes longer than a comparable install would have been on the physical hardware. Installing the Virtual Machine Additions made for excellent performance in the VM.

When I tried to install Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) in a VM, I was greeted with an ominous error message at the very start of the process. See for yourself:

Conspiracy theorists will assume that this is a Microsoft plot to cripple the popular Linux distro. However, it took me only five minutes to find the step-by-step instructions that allowed me to complete the installation and get graphics working at an acceptable resolution. The source? Microsoft blogger Sean Earp, whose informative post, Installing Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron in Virtual PC 2007, was in turn condensed from a post and several comments at the Arcane Code weblog.

When I was done with the relatively simple installation workaround, the Virtual PC console looked like this (with OpenSUSE 10.3 in the process of being installed):

Some of the weaknesses in Virtual PC remain. It still doesn’t provide support for Aero graphics, meaning any Vista VM will be stuck with the Windows Vista Basic theme. And it doesn’t support external USB devices (except for keyboards and mice, of course). So you can’t use a Virtual PC VM to directly access a USB device such as a scanner or TV tuner.

Next, I tried moving the virtual hard drive created with Virtual PC to a machine running Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. Virtual PC supports sound from a VM, using a virtual 16-bit Sound Blaster device, and Hyper-V has no sound support, so I was prepared for all transplanted VMs to be missing sound capability. For the Ubuntu VM, I had to replace the standard (virtual) network adapter with a Legacy Network Adapter. As soon as I did that, it worked perfectly.

If you already use Virtual PC 2007, this is a must download. If you had tried it previously and rejected it for performance reasons, it might be worth another try.

April 17th, 2008

Is Hyper-V ready for the Windows desktop?

Posted by Ed Bott @ 12:01 am

Categories: Service Pack 1, Virtualization, Windows 7, Windows Vista

Tags: Desktop, Virtualization, Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp., Hyper-V, VM, Linux Integration Component

A few days ago, my ZDNet blogging colleague Jason Perlow offered some suggestions on how he would design Windows 7 for maximum backward compatibility. One of his key proposals involved using virtualization to solve application compatibility problems:

What if Microsoft were to build a “Personal” Hyper-V into the Windows 7 client?

[...]

All Microsoft needs to do is include a stripped-down XP virtualized subsystem that contains all the core Windows XP SP3 libraries and a fully Para-virtualized XP kernel, so that it will run on 32-bit systems as well as 64-bit Intel VT-accelerated and AMD-V enabled systems, with a “Seamless” way to present XP applications, perhaps via a internal RDP interface or a DirectX accelerated virtual video driver, without having to run a complete XP desktop.

Is that all? Something tells me that might delay the launch date for Windows 7 until, oh, I don’t know, maybe the end of 2013? So I’m going to file that suggestion under N, for Not Gonna Happen. At least not until Windows 8 or even Windows 9.

But the topic did inspire me to sit down and take a closer look at Microsoft’s release candidate of Hyper-V, the virtualization platform that didn’t quite make it into Windows Server 2008. I’ve been using virtualization software on the PC platform for years, including workstation and server software from VMWare and, most recently, Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 R2 running on Windows Server 2003.

This is the first opportunity I’ve had to spend any hands-on time with Hyper-V. After less than a week, I’m hooked. And Jason’s suggestion, although ambitious, isn’t science fiction. Windows 7 is being built on the same code base as Windows Server 2008. So in theory at least, this software could be ported to the desktop OS. In this walkthrough and the accompanying image gallery, I’ll show you how Hyper-V works, what it can and can’t do, and where it falls short on the client side. Read the rest of this entry »