VMLite - an alternative Windows XP Mode impl

s0me0ne · 26 Aug 2009

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
another reason for using Virtal Box or vmware products.

No problem running a Virtual machine from a USB stick / Usb drive and you can add extra "Virtual Disk" drives to the vm provided your usb stick / drive has extra space. Drives can be either SCSI or IDE.

If you want you can also create the extra drive on an internal disk but that's not such a good idea if you want the vm to be self contained on the usb device.

Cheers
jimbo

Don't you still have to have Virtual Box installed on the computer that has the USB drive plugged in? I'd really like to see a program that lets you run VMs without having to install the program, I've heard QEMU does it but havent found any documentation on it or how fast it is.

huisinro · 26 Aug 2009

yes, QEMU can run your vm completely from user space, no installation required. However, it's very very slow in this mode. To get it faster, you will need QEMU Accelerator, which is a kernel driver and again requires installation.

Another thing about QEMU is that it lacks guest addition support, so the vm and host integration is not smooth, for example,you will have to capture/release mouse. There is no folder sharing, etc.

Night Hawk · 26 Aug 2009

Even with the XP mode or SUN's Portable VBox you still see the mouse captured while the exit method changes for each one. With the XP mode the alt-Tab key combo and for the PVBox you simply press the ctrl key to exit there.

huisinro · 26 Aug 2009

no, you don't. When the guest tools are installed, you can move mouse smoothly across vm Window and host Windows. The vm is like another native application. Perhaps, you haven't installed the guest additions if you need to press Ctrl key to release. QEMU does not have any of guest additions to install.

darkassain · 26 Aug 2009

huisinro said:

We will try to provide unique features, one of such is to automatically separate applications from the OS. Applications will be redirected to a second disk, and this disk will be able to plugin to another vm to instantly bring up all applications. This way, you can keep your apps separately from base OS. In other words, we are trying to implement file based snapshots, instead of disk based. File based snapshot enables you to apply the diff to a different vm.

This kind of features involves many years of efforts, application virtualization to change the registry and file system behaviors inside the vm as guest additions.

Ultimately, we will provide portable Windows virtual appliances without carrying the windows OS. In Linux world, bundling the OS is no issue, so Linux Virtual appliance is much more popular than Windows appliance.

interesting i see this this being somewhat difficult to achieve while at the same time have the same speed as some of the vm software such as vbox (with additions installed of course) and vmware (with its tools installed)

huisinro said:

By the way, we will support xp mode creation from the following sources:
(1) Major 3rd party vm images (v2v migration)
(2) OS CD images
(3) live physical machines (p2v migration)

The p2v converter can also be used with Virtual PC, so you can use it to migrate your existing XP machines to run as vm on Windows 7, whether or not through our virtualization software.
Thanks,

that is great news...
my question though is what image are implying as your standard image
meaning is the standard image is vdi (the standard image for VBox) or would it something different with a new feature set?

huisinro said:

no, you don't. When the guest tools are installed, you can move mouse smoothly across vm Window and host Windows. The vm is like another native application. Perhaps, you haven't installed the guest additions if you need to press Ctrl key to release. QEMU does not have any of guest additions to install.

so are going to implement some sort of acceleration driver/toolset so you can get the same speed as VBox and others?

Night Hawk · 27 Aug 2009

huisinro said:

no, you don't. When the guest tools are installed, you can move mouse smoothly across vm Window and host Windows. The vm is like another native application. Perhaps, you haven't installed the guest additions if you need to press Ctrl key to release. QEMU does not have any of guest additions to install.

It depands on what you are running on the MS Virtual PC there. Besides the XP mode I already have 7 running following an replacement upgrade from the previous Vista installation on the same vhd.

The XP mode so far is the only one where you can simply slide the cursor across the screen. The rest simply capture that as part of the process.

huisinro · 27 Aug 2009

oh, I see. You are absolutely right. I only played with XP mode. Seems XP mode is using RDP trick for the smooth mouse movement. There is no guest tool inside virtual PC doing mouse integration.

huisinro · 27 Aug 2009

Thanks for your points.

Back a few years ago, we started to implement an OS container for Windows apps. So a group of apps can run on windows within a separate context with their own registry and file system. In this model, the same OS instance is used, and thus achieve native performance. The downside of OS container is that it does not fully isolated from host OS. For example, a kernel driver crash will bring down the whole system. This drawback made us to look at system virtualization. We then started to integrate our OS container with a system virtual machine. Yes, it's very difficult. However, this integration will bring many benefits, we will gradually release the features.

With our converter, you can select an image format, we support vmdk, vdi, vhd and parallels format, these are the major vendors out there. With these formats, our converter does its best to make the disk bootable.

We use VBox OSE for the system virtualization layer, plus our own guest tools.

darkassain said:

interesting i see this this being somewhat difficult to achieve while at the same time have the same speed as some of the vm software such as vbox (with additions installed of course) and vmware (with its tools installed)

that is great news...
my question though is what image are implying as your standard image
meaning is the standard image is vdi (the standard image for VBox) or would it something different with a new feature set?

so are going to implement some sort of acceleration driver/toolset so you can get the same speed as VBox and others?

Night Hawk · 27 Aug 2009

VBox could use a little access to physical drives as well as the particular it goes on. The same could be said for a custom install on a vhd run on the Virtual PC simply being limited to the dvd drive there. The XP mode provides full accesss even for usb drives/devices with the latest RCs.

huisinro · 28 Aug 2009

We are implementing a powerful physical to virtual machine (P2V) converter, called "MyOldPCs", that can generate all popular formats (.vmdk, .vdi, .vhd, .hdd) and bootable in major vm vendors.

I'd like to get some inputs on whether need to support Windows 95/98/NT. Anyone here still have old computers with thos OSes and worth converting them to a vm?

Thanks,