Windows 7 – Virtualization
So you’ve upgraded to Windows 7 and now your considering the options for running virtual machines…
If you have a PC that’s capable of hardware assisted virtualization (I-VT or AMD-V) and you’re running Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate the decision is fairly easy; use the virtualization technology from Microsoft that provides you with Virtual XP mode (as well as generalized virtualization).
However, if you don’t have a PC capable of hardware virtualization or you didn’t spring for the more expensive version of Windows you have some good (free) choices.
While Microsoft doesn’t officially support Virtual PC 2007 SP1 on Windows 7, since it was designed to run under Vista it will work. The real downside is that you have fairly old virtualization technology emulating an antiquated hardware.
You could consider buying VMware or Parallels, but why spend money when there’s a better free alternative for personal use…
That would be – VirtualBox (yes, I’ve harped on VirtualBox for the Mac before, and now it’s time to harp on VirtualBox on the PC).
VirtualBox is a project sponsored by Sun Microsystems. They’ve actually been working on virtualization technology for a very long time, and their virtualization technology is top notch.
VirtualBox will run on several different operating system, you can even share the virtual machine files between operating systems if you like. But one of the really nice things about VirtualBox is that it will support machines with or without hardware assisted virtualization and it emulates very modern hardware (which makes the paravirtualization of devices much more efficient).
Unless you have specific requirements that force you to choose other virtualization software, I would recommend you take a good look at VirtualBox.
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