Windows 7 – Virtualization, Revisited
I posted yesterday on Windows 7 virtualization, and suggested that if you’d purchased Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate you’d probably just want to use the built-in Microsoft Virtualization (based on the Virtual PC 2007 code line).
However, after doing some testing, I’m not convinced.
Now if you have Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate and a machines that supports hardware virtualization, Microsoft will provide you not only a virtualization system, but also a copy of Windows XP to run under that virtualization system — so it might be a good choice from that standpoint. But…
Performance and features… well — VirtualBox has every feature in the Microsoft product, seems to run substantially faster, and supports more modern hardware emulation.
I need to do more testing to be totally sure, but at this point my feeling is just run VirtualBox on _all_ Windows 7 editions; and find an old copy of Windows XP to install in a virtual machine (you’ll have to read over the license agreement in detail from Microsoft to figure out if you can use the VHD they provide for XP Virtual Mode in another virtualization host).
Had Microsoft used the Hyper-V code base rather than the Virtual PC 2007 code base for virtualization in Windows 7 it would be a very different beast; but I guess the kids in Redmond can’t imagine someone actually wanting to do real virtualization on a desktop machine; but they can certainly justify raping you some feature in Professional and Ultimate verses Home Premium.
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