Virtual Windows?

howthe

howthe

howthe

Associate
Joined
27 Nov 2008
Posts
328
Hi,

I've recently used a piece of software that runs a virtual copy of windows inside windows. Although, after looking in to that software more it appears to of been discarded by the developers for a paid vista version. the name escapes me but its was free.

I was just wondering why exactly you would want to run a virtual windows anyway? What are the benefits of it?

When you install something while using the virtual windows are you installing it onto your actual windows folder tree or one of the virtual install?

Is it possible to get virtual software that doesn't require Admin rights to run it?

Sorry for all the questions, it is totally new to me so I find it quite interesting! :)
 
People use virtulisation for all sorts of things, on all sorts of software, MS Virtual PC and VMware are the 2 that spring too mind but there are others.

You might want to test how a piece of software runs under a different OS, you might want to use a legacy peice of software, you might want to use a virtual machine for testing suspicous software. It is completly virtual and acts like a seperate PC, does not effect the host in anyway. The virtual machine doesnt know its virtual and behaves just as you'd expect a full machine to do.

You see it a fair bit in networks, where the company want to run a seperate server but dont want to buy new hardware and have enough processing power to spare, they will run an entire server virtually.

Its also very useful for training and experimenting, if you were learning to use whatever server software and didnt want to build an entire PC to test it and play about with it on, you could run it all virtually, without effecting your actual machine.

Hope that answers some questions.
 
howthe said:
I've recently used a piece of software that runs a virtual copy of windows inside windows. Although, after looking in to that software more it appears to of been discarded by the developers for a paid vista version. the name escapes me but its was free.
Click to expand...

There are several vendors of Virtual Machine software, Microsoft do Virtual PC/Server, VMware do a wide range but their free prodcuts are VMware Server and ESXi and Sun do Virtualbox.

There are a couple of main types of VM software. Ones that runs a 'guest' (that's a machine that is soley a VM) on a OS 'host'. So, say you installed Virtualbox on your Windows XP machine (which is your host), you can than install Windows Vista in a 'guest' VM. This is how most end users use VM software. However, there is another type which uses a 'hypervisor'. This is a layer of virtualisation that sits directly on top of thardware. So say you have a totally fresh machine, you can install ESXi and then run any number of VMs on top of there. Therefore it doesn't require a host OS to run.

howthe said:
I was just wondering why exactly you would want to run a virtual windows anyway? What are the benefits of it?
Click to expand...

Benefits are numerous. It can be used for testing and for redundancy and load balancing. VMs are more widely being used for servers then clients and this is demonstrated with Microsoft Server 2008 and it's implementation of a hypervisor called Hyper-V. You can cluster virtual servers so that a VM can be dynamically moved from one machine to another, so say you have a server which you just can't afford to have offline; with a hypervisor, the underlying machine that it runs on can be changed. For example, one of your servers has it's motherboard die. Other servers 'nodes' within the cluster can resume the server on the fly. There are many other examples but I don't want to bore you.

howthe said:
When you install something while using the virtual windows are you installing it onto your actual windows folder tree or one of the virtual install?
Click to expand...

All VMs are totally encapsulated - otherwise called sandboxed. They are proper OS installs in their own right. So they have virtual hard disks to which only they can access. So if you create a Vm, you set aside say 30GB of storage for the HDD, then all data is stored in this file, so you have Windows, programs, even the VM's pagefile, just like you would have in a physical installation of Windows.

howthe said:
Is it possible to get virtual software that doesn't require Admin rights to run it?
Click to expand...
No, for a VM to run properly it needs to talk to very basic parts of the OS to lessen any performance hit that may be incurred (if you are running in a host OS), local admin rights are essential.
 
Last edited:
The other cool thing Microsoft is doing with virtualisation is having legacy apps that will not run on modern versions of windows (be it becuase they are 16bit and hence cannot be run on x64 windows, or they are internally developed and unable to run on anything but the OS they were developed on) run inside a VM but appear as a seamless window - so it looks just like any other app running on your desktop.

It's called MED-v and you can grab the BETA from Microsoft Connect.
 
philjohn said:
The other cool thing Microsoft is doing with virtualisation is having legacy apps that will not run on modern versions of windows (be it becuase they are 16bit and hence cannot be run on x64 windows, or they are internally developed and unable to run on anything but the OS they were developed on) run inside a VM but appear as a seamless window - so it looks just like any other app running on your desktop.

It's called MED-v and you can grab the BETA from Microsoft Connect.
Click to expand...

Virtualbox does that on Linux, but with apps that aren't linux native. It's really useful.
 
eXor said:
Do any of them do full 3D yet? What are the obstacles?
Click to expand...

VMWare has started to do that now. They're by far the most mature of the virtualisation technologies.

We're using Hyper-V (Microsoft's XEN compatible virtualisation tech, the successor to virtual pc) and it's pretty shiny. We've virtualised many of our services and have been able to disband 4 or 5 of our older servers onto a couple of newer much much much beefier servers (Ironically the beefy servers use less power too, the wonders of modern tech!)

There are of course one or two issues such as redundancy and backups which we've had to address, Instead of 1 physical server running 1 service we have 1 physical server running several virtual services. If that physical server has any issues, it affects all those services not just the one. Hyper-V and VMWares server versions support high availability clustering though, which works very well.
 
Moredhel said:
VMWare has started to do that now. They're by far the most mature of the virtualisation technologies.

We're using Hyper-V (Microsoft's XEN compatible virtualisation tech, the successor to virtual pc) and it's pretty shiny.
Click to expand...

I didnt know VMware could render DX9 - i assume that it renders via the CPU and not a dedicated card? If VMs could make use of real video hardware (sort of a pass through) it would be fantastic, although i guess very difficult to implement!

As a student i have a free copy of server 2008 and really liked hyper-V - it loads the OS a lot quicker then Vmware on my (dektop) PC. Mouse support in linux guests is a little poor, but 4 way virtual SMP is fantastic! I would have kept it but hyper-V does not work well with high end video hardware - i really need a CUDA driver, which made the desktop horribly laggy (although the linux OS was fine). Obviously i have no experience of it as a server OS, just as a workstation, and i'd bet a lot of money there would only be a handful of people with the exact same requirements as me, but it looks really good. I would love to see the tech built in to a windows desktop OS, although imagine this is less than likely.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom