Licencing For Windows Guest OS

Sevener111 · 26 Feb 2011

Hello everyone!

I have a Windows 7 Home premium machine. I also have a spare licence of Windows XP (Retail). My plan is to use windows XP inside of Windows Virtual PC (which I downloaded).

The Licence of XP is not installed on any other computers right now. My questions are as follows:

-Is it OK (not against EULA) to install a regular XP Professional licence inside Windows Virtual PC?
-Does the EULA allow for multiple virtual machines using the same licence on the same physical machine? (I give it a 98% chance that Activation would not allow it.)
-What about use of the 'Undo Disks" feature? Is it allowed by the (Windows XP) EULA?
-Is it against the EULA to use the 'Differencing Virtual Hard Disk' function of Windows Virtual PC?

My confusion with question #4 comes from this: The Differencing Disk feature allows one 'parent' or 'main' virtual hard disk to be used as the 'base' for others. The Differencing disks simply write the changes relative to the 'base'. On one hand, there is really only one copy of most of the system files. On the other, one Virtual PC might be considered like a physical machine in the licence terms.

Any clarification or correction is definitely appreciated.

Kari · 26 Feb 2011

Hello Sevener, welcome to the Seven Forums.

I have studied these questions quite a lot. The following is facts as I have interpreted them. Basically this is so logical and all information available on the net that I know this to be true:

Questions 1 & 2:

A virtual machine is (regarding license and EULA) as any other computer. Only Mac OSX operating system clearly states that use of it is allowed only on PC's manufactured by Apple. All Windows operating systems allow you to install one copy of a single license operating system to any computer, whether it be a real physical one or a virtual machine. If you have a single license you can only use the product key on one real or virtual machine. Setting up another virtual machine using the same code automatically makes it impossible to activate the second installation. One vm yes, two or more no.

Question 3:

Virtual PC's Undo Disk feature is nothing but an easy to use, fast imaging system. Creating an Undo Disk is just like creating a system image on a physical computer, and restoring virtual machine using Undo Disk is like restoring an image. Logically, you are allowed to backup and restore your operating system as you wish. Just remember to activate the XP first before creating an Undo Disk, so that if the need arises to restore the XP using Undo Disk, you don't have to re-activate Windows.

Question 4:

This is the only one of your questions in which my answer is rather based on logics and my opinion than facts because of facts regarding this issue are incredible difficult to find. If we were talking about XP Mode vm which you can not use because of your host OS, my answer could be found in this post.

Thinking this logically, this is how I see the issue: You are allowed to use your own XP install media and license to install XP on a virtual machine. All Windows OS's allow multiple user accounts. In a virtual machine running on Virtual PC on your host computer, this means in my opinion logically that every user account of your host is allowed to use guest operating systems installed on that computer. In Virtual PC, this is easiest done so that an administrator of that host computer creates a virtual machine using differencing disks, a global parent disk located in a folder where all users have access and then individual, user specific personal vhd's in every user's own folders (re: Windows XP Mode base vhd in Program Files and individual vhd in UserProfile). So yes, I would like to think it is not against EULA.

Kari