Windows 7 & Virtual PC
It’s The End Of The World As We Know It…
There’s been a lot of noise this week around the broad availability of Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) (available for download here), but the thing that caught my attention was the beta availability of a new version of Virtual PC, specifically designed for Windows 7.
Now, you have probably noticed the increased focus here at Microsoft on 64-bit computing, with the Exchange Server team no longer shipping a 32-bit version and many other server products likely to follow suit (yes SharePoint Server 2010, I’m looking at you). In the not-too-distant future I can see a time when I will need to run 64-bit virtual machines just to be able to deliver my standard demos.
Since Virtual PC 2007 doesn’t support 64-bit guests, I was hoping that the new Windows 7 version would add this much-requested feature. Alas, it would appear that my hopes have been cruelly dashed if the following TechNet forum thread is to be believed - VPC and 64-bit Guest Support. It looks as though my only 100% Microsoft option is to use Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-v as my notebook PC host OS. Alternatively, I could always purchase a copy of VMWare Workstation which supports both 32-bit and 64-bit guest OS, but as a loyal Microsoft employee (and mostly because I don’t want to spend my own money), I probably won’t….or then again…:-).
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Laughing Boy Chestnuts Pre-School
Comments
Anonymous
May 07, 2009
PingBack from http://asp-net-hosting.simplynetdev.com/windows-7-virtual-pc/Anonymous
May 07, 2009
It’s The End Of The World As We Know It… There’s been a lot of noise this week around the broad availabilityAnonymous
May 15, 2009
You can always use VMWare Server for free, get pretty much the same functionality as HyperV but not have to run W2K8 as a host OS. Also gain the ability to have VM disks plsit into 2Gb chunks which make defragging much easier hence better performance.