Windows XP Guest as normal VM.

Hey guys,

I have recently bought two new workstations that have Windows 7 Professional on them and they run perfectly. With our old workstations, we used to run XP Professional as a host and XP Professional as a guest OS (to give our users more chance to multi-task, one of our applications can only use one CPU so it was a good shout to make a VM to use another CPU, anyway ...) it worked really well, neither host nor guest had slow downs and both ran things like Office suits and database applications.

Now we are using Windows 7, I have installed XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC and have created a new Virtual Machine that runs XP - ie, I'm NOT using XP mode as I don't think it'll be up being used a proper machine - but it runs terribly slow to the point where it's pointless having it.

The host machines are pretty high spec, Intel Xeon E5506 quad-core 2.13GHz, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 512MB nVidia Quadro FX580 graphics card so I don't really understand why an XP VM would run so slow. I've given it 2GB of RAM and a CPU to use, is this slowdown by design or have I missed something?

Thanks for the help,
Adam.

Hmm...I wish I could have tried this before I erased XP Mode.

Why didn't you tell us sooner, Kari?

Hi Kari,

thanks for the suggestion, I have put those lines into the options.xml file but it doesn't seem to have made any discernible difference to the performance of my XP VM. My applications still take years to run on the guest that open in seconds on the host yet if you look at processes etc running on the guest, it's bearly touched the available CPU and memory allocations. Should XP VMs run perfectly smoothly or am I better trying a Vista VM instead?

TIA,
Adam.

Kari said:

I have no performance issues using XP Mode after modifying the options.xml and setting performance options to best performance. I am completely happy with my XP Mode.

You could try installing Sun VirtualBox. It's free, it allows also 64-bit quests (Virtual PC only 32-bit) and according to some users it is faster.

Kari

I'm not using XP Mode, I'm using a fully fledged, bona fide Virtual Machine that I have decided to install XP on as I want a proper machine that can run all the time (we all have dual monitors here) and be used as though we have two workstations on our desks. XP Mode, as I understand it - feel free to correct me, is just for getting a few legacy apps running and is designed more to help users integrate XP compatability into Windows 7. This is not what I want to achieve, I used to have an XP host machine running an XP guest machine and they were both used as though they were physical machines. It is this that I want to achieve with Windows 7 but the XP Virtual Machine runs like a one-legged dog.

I'll try some different VM software and see if that makes any difference if we can't think of anything else here. Using different VM software sounds like it would waste some of my licenses so I'd rather not go down this route straight away.

Hi

VMWARE PLAYER version 3 is a good FREE bet as well as VIRTUAL SERVER from vmware.
For running XP virtual machines you don't have to worry about 3D and Aero support so Vmware Virtual server IMO would be the best option for what you want to do.

VMWARE Workstation is good but costs quite a bit of money (around 150 USD or so).

Incidentally you can convert Virtual PC VHD's to vmware format - otherwise just re-install XP as a Guest machine again.

Vmware software runs just fine on my machines.

(Note Cloning an XP machine won't call for re-activation since it's an identical clone of what it was cloned from -- however not quite sure what the EULA says on that).

Using vmware Virtual server means that your Guest VM's can run as a background process - other users can LOG ON to the VM without being logged on to the Host.

Can be useful as you don't even have to enable any users on the HOST machine.

Cheers
jimbo