Microsoft Virtual PC

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is a desktop virtual machine solution to help you migrate legacy applications to Windows Vista. Virtual PC offers customers a cost-effective safety net to ease their migration to Microsoft Windows Vista and a tool to help accelerate the development, testing, deployment, and support of PC applications.

For example, Microsoft Virtual PC allows enterprise customers to run multiple operating systems on one PC, so employees can run critical legacy applications on an interim basis while IT professionals proceed with the migration to the end user’s workstation to the latest version of the Windows operating system.


Benefits. Virtual PC 2004 marked Microsoft’s entry into the Windows-based virtual machine arena in 2003. The product was built on virtualization technology that Microsoft acquired in February 2003 from Connectix Corp.

Virtual PC offers the benefit of rapid reconfiguration. For instance, the software can enhance the productivity of technical support, help desk, or call center employees by enabling them to easily switch among operating systems without logging in and out between calls.

Virtual PC is also designed to accelerate software testing by allowing developers to test and debug their software for multiple platforms in a timely and cost-effective manner, all on one PC, improving both software quality and time to market.


Features. Features of Microsoft Virtual PC include support for as many as four network adapters per virtual machine, all through the graphical user interface; Extensible Markup Language (XML) file-based configuration of virtual machines to ease the copying of a virtual machine to another computer; and support for up to 3.6GB of memory. More memory makes it possible to run more operating systems simultaneously and improves the performance of operating systems with larger memory requirements.

Key features carried over from the former Connectix product include:
• The virtual machine additions, that provide a high level of integration between host and guest operating systems, including integrated mouse, time synchronization, cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, and folder sharing

• Undo Disks, which allows users to delete any changes they make to the virtual hard disk during a session

• Differencing Disks, which lets multiple users and multiple virtual machines use the same parent virtual hard disk at the same time.

Virtual PC also runs most x86 operating systems in the virtual machine environment with no need for custom drivers. This compatibility positions customers to migrate legacy applications and consolidate desktops for dramatic cost savings.



Virtual PC supports these host operating systems:
• Windows Vista (32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista Ultimate, Enterprise, Business editions, and European Business N only; but not Windows Vista Starter, Windows Vista Home Basic or Home Premium, or European Vista Home N editions)
• Windows XP Professional and Tablet PC Edition (32-bit) and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (not Windows XP Home Edition or Windows XP Media Center Edition)
• Windows Server 2003



Virtual PC supports these guest operating systems:
• Windows Vista (all 32-bit editions)
• Windows XP (all 32-bit only)
• Windows Server 2008 (Virtual PC 2007 Service Pack1 onward)
• Windows 2000 Professional and Server
• Windows 98 Second Edition
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• Certain editions of IBM OS/2


Source of Information : Microsoft Virtualization with Hyper V

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