Post your questions to the MSFT Virtualization team

[polycue]

Are there any issues involved in moving our virtual machines to another windows 7 machine?

 

[Zardoc]

I have two questions.

1. Why is XP mode only 16bit color?
2. Do you have any plans for 64bit guest OS support?

Hi since you are in France, I can answer question 1 for you right away.

There is a hack to get 32 bit colour.

Fellow MVP Pierre Torris has the answer for you (in French since you are lost in France)
Pierre Torris Home Page

 

[7xpm]

useable serial com ports?

Will serial com ports from a pci express card show up and be useable in XP mode?

Testing with 8 port usb to serial unit using "attach device" proved to be problematic and ultimately un-useable.

Thanks

---------------------------------------------------

OK, I guess I am left to answer this myself.
That would be NO.

 

[ZaLiTH]

I came to see the responses to Hyper V and XP Mode specifically, but since I'm already here:

would this rig be hyper V ?

Gateway - Laptop with Intel® Core™ i3 Processor - NightSky Black - NV7915u

The hardware supports it (Intel Core i3-330M Processor specs), but you might need to upgrade the OS to at least Professional before XP Mode specifically will work. According to Wikipedia, only Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise will allow XP Mode to be installed.

 

[sygnus21]

According to Wikipedia, only Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise will allow XP Mode to be installed.

Also to Microsoft's own "Windows XP Mode for Windows 7 brochure" which can be downloaded here... Windows Virtual PC: Documentation and Videos

Windows XP Mode with Windows Virtual PC Requires:​

• Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Ultimate or Windows 7 Enterprise
• Additional 1GB of RAM
• Additional 15GB of available disk space​

• Processor capable of hardware virtualization with AMD-V™ or Intel® VT turned on

 

[pacinitaly]

you all are AWESOME

 

[Neil Sanderson]

What are the best resources for learning how to use the technologies in a professional/business environment.

I would start with Hyper-V, Virtualization | Server and Application Resources on TechNet

 

[Neil Sanderson]

Are there any issues involved in moving our virtual machines to another windows 7 machine?

Do you mean using XP Mode?

 

[James O'Neill]

Are there any issues involved in moving our virtual machines to another windows 7 machine?

You should be able to copy the VHD file from one machine to another.
Be aware that Windows XP mode uses differencing disks and you will run into difficulties if the location of the parent VHD - or the VHD itself - arent the same between VMs.

I Usually re-create the VM but you can copy the VMCX file - if you open this in a notepad you'll see it also points to a VMC file and the VHD using paths which are user specific, so this can be a bit of hack.

Windows Virtual PC : Various File Types for Virtual Machine Backup in Windows Virtual PC has more information.

 

[Neil Sanderson]

i have one, not very good but what is the theoretical maximum of virtual cpu's you can have on one pc

512 virtual cpus on Hyper-V, 4 on Virtual PC

 

[James O'Neill]

Does Virtual PC 2007 support 64 bit operating systems?

I know this is a little late, but yes - Download Windows XP Mode. I'm using it as we speak. Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

Yes I know this is the download for XP Mode, but you can also download Virtual PC from there as well since XP Mode uses it. Once you select your OS, the download link will pop up

The bigger question (for those wondering) Is can your PC run Virtual PC? Windows Virtual PC: Configure BIOS

Just be aware we have Virtual PC 2007 and newer better Windows Virtual PC which is based on the same technology. Both have variants for 64 bit host operating systems but they can only support 32 bit guest operating systems.

 

[Phil Cross]

1. Would they consider releasing a win9x mode? So instead of XP mode, it could be one for Windows 98 in case anyone needs even older compatibility.

XP mode is made up of Virtual PC and pre-configured Virtual machine. An organization with a Windows 9x requirement could run a 9x VM but it would not have the same integration component support. Our customer feedback suggests this is not a common need. Also, since Windows 9x is out of support we will not be producing anything in this area.

2. Could they add floppy image support.

Yes, it is there in Hyper-V but no in Virtual PC....

 

[Phil Cross]

It would seem that we would be able to link virtual pc's together creating a virtual network within our existing hardware based network. is this going to be possible?

Yes this is possible now. You can do 3 things. Create a private network entirely within 1 physical computer or you can create VMs which connect to the network using the network interface card of the host you are running on. With Virtual PC but not with HyperV there is network address translation built into the Virtualisation layer which allows you to connect using the network address of the host computer.

and another, with the rapid advance in cell phone technology when can we expect applications that give us full control over our home or work PC's.

We have Live Mesh which does this already for the home, and you can use Terminal Services with the gateway to get to your work desktop machines from a PC or network over any suitable data connection including 3G. Windows Mobile (Touch Screen Devices) includes a Remote Desktop Client but this does not support the terminal services gateway so requires use of a VPN to connect to machines which are not internet facing.

 

[Neil Sanderson]

Is Virtual PC 2007 going to get a Service Pack 2 to support:

• Windows 7 as a Guest OS?
• Windows 7 as a Host OS?

Virtual PC 2007 runs on Windows 7, but it doesn't like shared folders when the guest is Windows 7.

Windows Virtual PC is available for free download and supports Windows 7 as the host and Windows XP, Vista or 7 as the guest.

Windows Virtual PC: Compare Features

 

[James O'Neill]

Will serial com ports from a pci express card show up and be useable in XP mode?

Testing with 8 port usb to serial unit using "attach device" proved to be problematic and ultimately un-useable.

Thanks

In virtual PC settings you shuld be able map a host physical port through to the Guest - I've just tried this with a bluetooth GPS puck which shows up as COM4 in the host OS so there doesn't seem to be any requirement to be a traditional COM Port.

 

[James O'Neill]

I would like to mount my host's backup system image vhd-file as a second hard disk in my Virtual PC Vista virtual machine, to be able to extract single files when needed. However, my system image is huge, ATM some 220+ GB, and because of 127B size limit I am not able to this.

Is there a way to use bigger than 127GB virtual disks?

Kari

VHD files themselves have a much bigger size limit
The emulated IDE controller has a maxiumum drive size of 127GB : in virtual *server* you can use a SCSI controller to get round this limit (and you don't have to install VS on a server OS). Hyperv in server 2008 / 2008R2 has removed this limit from the IDE controller.

 

[fakeasdf]

I'm not sure if you've mentioned it yet, but Hyper V does support 64 bit OS guest support.

Question: Windows 7 chose to restart my computer last night after an update (I know there is a registry setting to disable this). I had 2 virtual pc's running. They were both forced to shutdown, it seems to me that when they are sent a kill sequence (pc shutting down) they should go into hibernate instead of shutting down. There were a slew of things I had in development that was a little bit of an annoyance to have to 1. wait for the Virtual PC to fully start up, and 2. restart all of the applications inside of the Virtual PC and hope they were saved. Any future implementation to make this a little more user friendly?

 

[James O'Neill]

Hi! ^_^

My questions are:

1. Why the MIDI synthesizer selector in Audio and Sound Devices is disabled? (by the way: more like "ripped-off" than "disabled" ).
2. Is there any way to get that option back in the future?

Thank you.

When I tested this on Windows Virtual PC it showed as Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth in Sounds and Audio Devices.

 

[Edwin Yuen]

I'm not sure if you've mentioned it yet, but Hyper V does support 64 bit OS guest support.

Question: Windows 7 chose to restart my computer last night after an update (I know there is a registry setting to disable this). I had 2 virtual pc's running. They were both forced to shutdown, it seems to me that when they are sent a kill sequence (pc shutting down) they should go into hibernate instead of shutting down. There were a slew of things I had in development that was a little bit of an annoyance to have to 1. wait for the Virtual PC to fully start up, and 2. restart all of the applications inside of the Virtual PC and hope they were saved. Any future implementation to make this a little more user friendly?

We have this feature in Hyper-V but not in the current version of Windows Virtual PC. I will pass the feedback on about this though.

 

[fakeasdf]

Second Virtual PC problem, when I right click on a large set of data off of a network location and hit copy in the host machine and if I right click later in the guest machine it automatically starts to copy that data into a temp folder somewhere as if I want to copy the data into the virtual machine. This can be super annoying since I'm often moving files or sets of files between 400 Mb and 12 Gb. Especially annoying since if you hit cancel it just restarts copying the files to the temp location...